Hightower

archive http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/lowdown/archive

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substack

https://jimhightower.substack.com/p/shouldnt-the-democratic-party-actually

Will Rogers joked that when thousands of rural Oklahomans fled the 1930s Dust Bowl and migrated to California: “It raised the intellectual level of both states.”

Following that line of thought, it occurred to me that America could benefit mightily if the Democratic Party’s overbearing corporate contingent were to migrate to their natural domain, the Republican Party. Seriously, as

Robert Reich

recently wrote: “Who in the world needs corporate Democrats?”

Thomas Jefferson warned of the democracy-crushing threat of America’s emerging “moneyed corporations.” And, sure enough, here they are today – literally owning the White House, Congress, Judiciary, most state governments… and suppressing democracy itself.

They’re entrenched not because they’re championed by the Republican Party, but because the once-proud party of America’s broad working class has also yoked itself to corporate money and embraced Republican policies of corporate supremacy. Where does that leave the great majority of working stiffs on election day? Staying home, feeling abandoned as both parties cater to the moneyed elite.

While many corporate Democrats insist they’re “social progressives,” it would be a profound public service for them to carry those social values directly into Republican primaries, softening that party’s raw minginess a bit. At the same time, their departure would free the Democratic Party from being financially shackled to the corporate agenda, letting it return to its roots as the unequivocating champion of working-class, little-d democrats.

By clarifying the core policy differences of both parties, elections could matter to most people again, presenting honest choices between a democratic or a plutocratic future. Pie-in-the-sky? Maybe, or even probably. But baking a pie starts by turning on the heat.

jul 2025

🚨🚨🚨 From the Lowdown’s “Early Political Warning System” comes this Code Red alert… 🚨🚨🚨 a fast-moving front of corporate corruption is sweeping westward from the White House… 🚨🚨🚨… Residents are urged to seek higher ethical ground immediately… 🚨🚨🚨

This is not a test, but a warning of an unnatural disaster: A plutocratic cabal of corporate elites is aiming to gut and eventually eliminate America’s National Weather Service! Yes, that’s the extensive network of scientific analysts, monitoring systems, researchers, emergency responders, and others trying to anticipate, prepare for, and protect us from the worst of storms, floods, wildfires, and other calamities.

Upgrade your subscription

In the name of “efficiency,” Republican politicos are now defunding and cancelling essential storm warning centers, hurricane monitoring staffs, flood rescue teams – and they’re even closing some forecast offices at night (as though bad weather checks out at sunset). Why?

Greed. Wall Street profiteers – including Trump appointees and political funders – have long lusted to privatize the weather service. While no one can control the weather, it is possible to control, commodify, and monopolize the collection, interpretation, and distribution of forecasting data. So, Trump Inc. intends to stop providing these functions as a public service for the benefit of all. Instead, weather data would become a corporate profit center, packaged and sold at premium prices to media conglomerates, insurance giants, private resorts, and others who can afford it.

These privatizing profiteers are shameful. They’re deliberately demonizing, destaffing, and dismantling a public servicethat is essential to America’s common good – just so they can steal it for their own profit. To rebel against their destructive greed, check out Union of Concerned Scientists: UCS.org

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an 5 24

what’s the matter with Congress? And most of our state legislatures, too? Why do these so-called representative bodies keep stiffing middle-class and poor families, refusing to respond to the most urgent needs and goals of this vast majority of Americans?

Take lawmakers’ indifference to the childcare crisis crushing the finances, health, and spirit of millions of working families. Plus, intentionally denying basic healthcare for low-income children in this spectacularly rich nation.

These common incidents of child neglect are products of the creeping plutocratic ideology now dominating capitals across America. Most legislatures today push corporate profiteering, including re-legalizing robber baron exploitation of children. Bills to reinstate child labor are being advanced in 28 states, and 12 have already passed!

As the old saying goes: If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

Why is the workaday majority being ignored and corporate supremacy being imposed over the common good? In a word: class.

Think about it: Who holds nearly all of the seats in Congress and in state legislatures? Not plumbers, mechanics, taxi drivers, trash haulers, hotel housekeepers, computer programmers, farm workers, or childcare providers. Instead, it’s bankers, lawyers, corporate executives, lobbyists, millionaires, and ideological goofballs.

Even though half of America’s jobs are working class, barely 1% of our nation’s 7,300 state legislative seats are held by the working class people who actually make America work.

As the old saying goes: If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. And our political system has been rigged by corporate lobbyists, lawmakers, and judges to hold public office hostage to big money—intentionally excluding the working-class majority from its rightful place at America’s policy table.

To start freeing democracy from corrupt corporate money, go to Public Citizen at citizen.org.

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hightower 1 24 an

in cities all across America, an infiltration of wealthy investors, developers and bankers is driving poor and middle-class families out of their own towns.

What's at work here is the relentless financial shove of high-dollar gentrification. House by house, block by block, moneyed interests suddenly (and often secretly) buy up properties, bulldozing modest family homes to erect sprawling edifices for the rich.

It's a profiteering money grab that intentionally prices out regular homebuyers. Worse, it also artificially skyrockets property taxes for the area's longtime homeowners, forcing them to sell out and leave town.

NOW READ:Why Trump ran away with Iowa

This financial whirligig is enormously destructive to a community's crucial sense of fairness and ... well, community. For one glaring example, look at who likely does NOT live in your city: schoolteachers, fire fighters, police, nurses, utility crews and others who're essential to making any city work.

If the so-called "free market" can't (or won't) provide affordable spaces so these families can "come home," where they belong, then the community itself must step up to meet the need with creative public initiatives.

The good news is that many cities are doing just that, including where I live. Fed up with losing teachers who endure spirit-sucking, hourlong commutes from distant suburbs, Austin's school board recently created its own affordable housing arm. It's starting to build hundreds of rental homes affordable to teachers, cafeteria workers, bus drivers and other school employees. In addition, the district has formed a "public facility corporation" that partners with local developers and groups like Habitat for Humanity to build and sell family homes at prices within reach of the city's school employees.

Housing is not only a basic human need but also a community essential that can't be left to the whims and greed of developers.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DIDN'T JUST DREAM; HE ORGANIZED!

It's time once again for America's annual sing-along of "We Shall Overcome," in celebration of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. As even schoolchildren know, he famously had a dream. His dream was that over the long arc of history, America will someday achieve racial harmony -- ifBlack people will stop being pushy about racial injustice.

Oh, wait -- that's the right wing's current whitewashed version of King's dream, scrubbing out his condemnation of brutally racist white leaders and institutions (which still repress Black progress and foment racial hatred). And far from meekly waiting on "the arc of history," King rallied people to take immediate action, calling it "the fierce urgency of now."

He sought "a grand alliance of Negro and White (to) eradicate social evils (that) oppress both White and Negro." At the time of his assassination, he was actively forging that populist coalition to battle plutocratic wealth.

Indeed, King knew the history he sought to revive. The post-Civil War Populist Movement, he said, "began awakening the poor White masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that (both) were being fleeced by (Southern aristocrat interests)." That movement, he noted, intended to write a black-white voting bloc "to build a great society of justice where none would prey upon the weakness of others; a society of plenty where greed and poverty would be done away."

But the unifying, democratic promise of Populism, King rightly explained, so terrified the aristocracy of wealth that its leaders made it "a crime for Negroes and Whites to come together as equals at any level." Thus moneyed elites effectively killed the people's Populist party in the 1890s -- but not the people's Populist spirit.

So rather than merely celebrating a birthday, let's recommit to King's real dream of a multiracial, democratic Populism.

an 12 23

according to an old saying, "You can't squeeze blood from a turnip." True. But that raises this question: Who would even try squeezing blood from a turnip?

Well, metaphorically speaking, if "blood" means profit, and "turnips" are customers, airlines are eager to apply the squeeze. As are banks, credit card outfits, cable TV and internet hucksters, car rental companies, concert promoters... and can anyone decipher their insurance policies?

I'm not talking about fair profit, but junk fees, hidden charges, undisclosed add-ons and other "gotchas" that brand-name giants sneak into the fine print of their price tags. It's pure corporate larceny, adding up to a stunning level of unearned profit for the perpetrators: Airlines picked our pockets for nearly $7 billion last year in baggage fees alone; credit card dealers plucked $14 billion from us in punitive late fees; and the overall corporate haul from this secretive squeeze on consumers now tops $64 billion a year!

Shouldn't companies have to tell you -- in plain language -- what they're actually charging you... and for what? "Yes!" says President Joe Biden, who's pressuring the gougers to come clean. "Hooray!" exult consumers, who're tired of being played for suckers.

Of course, as another saying notes, "Where there's a will, there's a thousand won'ts." So, a flock of corporate lobbyists are now swarming the Capitol, crying: "Save junk fees!" Their arguments are hilariously absurd: They assert that price disclosure will "confuse consumers"; that government should not "interfere" in the free market; that it's "technically infeasible" to tell consumers the real price -- and a group who actually quibbled, "What exactly is a fee?"

To help raise common sense and plain fairness to high places, check out the work Public Interest Research Group at www.pirg.org.

WOODY GUTHRIE'S ANTHEM MOCKING RIGHT-WING REPUBLICANISM

What it is about today's vituperative, foam-at-the-mouth Republican party?

No longer disguising their desire to repress women, workers, immigrants, the poor and all others who differ with (or are different from) their own partisan clan, the party has turned to a politics of hatred and division, openly seeking to punish opponents they now brand as "enemies" and "vermin." What's motivating this plunge into such undiluted political sourness?

My simple observation is that they've succumbed to a base impulse expressed in one straightforward word: MEANNESS. After all, their current agenda amounts to hurting people they don't like, trying to keep America's diverse majority from getting such basic human needs and rights as health care, the vote, fair wages, reproductive liberty and public education free of church dictates.

That's not "conservative," it's just mean.

This malicious strain of selfish Republicanism has flared up periodically in our history, with the few striving to repress the many. Woody Guthrie even wrote an anthem in the 1940s mocking those crusading for such a morally depraved politics:

"I'm the meanest man that ever had a brain

...

I hate everybody don't think like me...

And I'm readin' all the books I can

To learn how to hurt...

Keep you without no vote,

Keep you without no union.

...

Well, if I can get the fat to hatin' the lean,

That'd tickle me more than anything I've seen,

Then get the colors fightin' one another,

And friend against friend, and brother and sister against brother..

...

I love to hate and I hate to love!

I'm mean, I'm just mean."

This song is dedicated to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, Rep. Jim Jordan, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, and... well, you know who you are.

jim h

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/meet-the-true-trump-loyalists-influence-peddlers-practicing-the-dark-art-of-bending-government-power/

the Donald is in a funk. He’s been outsmarted by an inert virus. His poll numbers are tanking, and even his demagogic pep rallies are falling flat.

So, who to turn to for political comfort? Why, of course, Trump’s true loyalists: his diehard cadre of Washington’s corporate lobbyists. I don’t merely mean those elites of K-Street and Wall Street who dominate his Cabinet, constituting the official Trump government of, by, and for corporate greed. He also has a “kitchen cabinet.” Operating out of public view, it’s an unofficial collection of highly paid influence peddlers who’re still practicing the dark art of bending government power to the wishes of selfish corporate interests. Each of them is paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by brand-name clients — from Amazon to Walgreens — to get favors from Trump. In turn, these little-known lobbyists have now adopted The Donald as their chief client, funneling millions of special-interest dollars into his reelection campaign with the understanding that he’ll keep channeling tax breaks, regulatory exemptions and public dollars to the corporate donors. It’s the Washington money-go-round, merrily corrupting our government.

Who are these no-name corrupters?David Urban is one, considered the best-connected corporate huckster in the Trump swamp. He’s an old college pal of both Pentagon chief Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Moreover, he’s become such a close buddy of Donald himself that he’s known as a “Trump Whisperer,” able to work around the furies that rage in that strange orange head.

Such cozy ties to the top mean Urban gets his calls returned, an invaluable asset for his favor-seeking clientele, including Raytheon, Goldman Sachs, Bayer, Nike and Toyota. They, in turn, have made Urban rich, paying the once-obscure lobbyist more than $25 million since the Trumpeteers took office. And why wouldn’t they? For example, in 2019 the giant weapons maker Raytheon wanted to sell several billion dollars’ worth of missiles to Saudi Arabia’s royal rulers, but there was a congressional ban on such sales. No problem: (1) Raytheon enlisted Urban as their fixer; (2) he asked his pal Pompeo to meet with Raytheon’s CEO; and (3) voila! — the arms dealer promptly got a state department waiver to make the sale.

So, Washington lobbyists like Urban are now the top strategists and fundraisers for Trump 2020, hoping to get another four-year ride on the corrupt money-go-round.

During today’s COVID-19 crisis, the PR departments of every brand-name corporation are running slick ads nobly proclaiming: “We’re all in this together!”

Simultaneously, the corporate lobbying departments are ignobly using the public’s focus on the health crisis as cover for selfishly grabbing government favors for the corporation — everyone else be damned. And Trump’s totally corporate White House has been their corrupt cohort, serving as a front-end loader for everything from more corporate tax giveaways to jiggered labor rules that stiff workers.

One of the grabbiest special interests are well-off corporate and parochial private schools, where students from some of America’s wealthiest families get their education. For years, the nonpublic entities have been lobbying relentlessly to make taxpayers finance their schools, even though the schools are not open to all and usually have a narrow ideological or religious curriculum — including some extremist courses teaching that public schools should be eliminated.

That extremist nook is where Betsy DeVos resides. She’s a multibillionaire heiress and long-time funder of far-right causes. Chosen by Trump to run America’s education department, she’s been trying — by hook or crook — to run our schools straight into private hands… but with no success. Along came the COVID-19 federal relief package, including funds to help meet the education needs of low-income students in hard-hit public schools.

Hallelujah! shouted DeVos, grabbing the coronavirus as a way to advance her ideological agenda. In May, she issued an edict from on high requiring local public school districts to divert millions of the relief dollars from their disadvantaged students, forcing them to share their allotment with even the richest private schools. Astonishingly, Trump’s haughty education secretary rationalized her directive as a matter of economic fairness, piously informing locals that they must not “discriminate” against the rich.

DeVos’ “share-with-the-rich” dictum can be a bit imbalanced. Officials in New Orleans, for example, note that under her formula, 77% of its allotment would end up in private hands. Luckily, her “order” does not have the force of law, and public schools are fighting back. For information and action, go to the National Coalition for Public Education: NCPEcoalition.org.

https://hightowerlowdown.org/article/new-corporate-protection-laws-are-stomping-on-our-most-basic-rights/

New corporate-protection laws are stomping on our most basic rights

aS British playwright and political agitator George Bernard Shaw noted, “You don’t make progress by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well-hammered yourself.”

That certainly has been true of US progressives. We never could advance our people’s “small-d” democratic goals by idly hoping the established powers will do it for us. After all, they’re the ones doing it to us–imposing plutocratic rule to increase their fortunes at our expense. Rather, it is audacious American rebels who’ve incrementally advanced our democratic possibilities by defying the repressive laws of the authoritarian order.

In fact, Protest is us! And it ain’t beanbag. The history of US democracy is the story of fed-up, gutsy people engaged in wave after wave of confrontation with haughty corporate, political, and social powers that forcibly suppress our democratic will. Because of that suppression, effective public protest is not for the meek. By its nature, it is disobedient, passionate, aggressive, disruptive, and sometimes bloody. That’s the price of progress.

Indeed, there would be no USA if outraged colonials had merely sent missives to King George saying, Please stop doing these bad things to us. Consider a historic protest we now celebrate as a glorious, seminal moment in our opposition to British autocracy: the Boston Tea Party. In 1773, Sam Adams and an audacious band of Massachusetts rebels clambered aboard three British East India Company trading ships moored in Boston Harbor. Rebelling against an English decree giving that corporation monopoly power over tea imports to America, Adams and other “Sons of Liberty” illegally trespassed on the corporate property, seized its cargo of 342 chests of tea, and hurled them into the harbor.

It was an act of constructive destruction and iconic defiance of plutocratic authority, which rallied public support and helped spark the American Revolution. Most significantly, it set an ethical standard for legitimate protest in our country that for generations since has guided abolitionists, suffragists, unionists, populists, immigrants, feminists, environmentalists, and other democracy activists. Protest is fully ingrained in the American character.

Suspending the right to protest

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three left turns do." --Jim Hightower

Add to America’s panorama of momentous protests another dramatic action: On September 12, 2019, a team of bold environmental advocates literally put their lives on the line to confront the global crisis of industrially induced climate change. You might not have heard about it, for their protest was barely noticed by the purveyors of mass media, who were busy chasing the latest nonsensical tweets of the artful dodger in the White House. Yet it certainly ranks as a captivating, and still unfolding, story of principled dissent.

The action involved 22 Greenpeace USA activists from 13 states and the District of Columbia. Using static lines attached to a huge bridge, 11 of the activists suspended themselves 150 feet above the Houston Ship Channel and shut down Big Oil’s largest US outlet for climate-destroying petrochemicals. The dangling protesters closed the channel, halting oil tankers owned by the likes of the Exxon and Shell et al. that move 700,000 barrels of oil every day from the second-largest refinery complex in the US. Some 18 hours passed before, as reported by KHOU-TV news, an over-the-top cluster of police power–including riot-clad sheriff officers, FBI agents, members of the Coast Guard, local fire departments, and the Texas Department of Transportation–was able to arrest the activists.

There is an even deeper story, however, for the action brought to light an especially devious effort by establishment autocrats to repress our people’s fundamental freedom to dissent against corporate abuse. Soon after their arrests, the intrepid climate defenders found themselves suspended in an even more precarious way: Their First Amendment freedoms of speech and assembly were subverted by a new, little-known law passed at the behest of the very same corporate powers they had dared to protest.

ALEC attacks

Unbeknownst to the general public (and still largely undiscovered by national media), oil giants and other multinational corporations have quietly colluded with the legislators and governors they’ve purchased. Together, they’ve rammed through a series of autocratic state laws criminalizing our right to protest at sites they imperiously designated “critical infrastructure.” Encompassed in the sweeping lockdown inherent in this often-specious designation are public demonstrations that the sneaky new laws defined as “criminal interference.” In fact, the thing they interfere with is the hallowed pursuit of profits by myriad corporate scoundrels including frackers, mine operators, pipeline builders, chemical plants, refineries, electrical utilities, TV facilities, and factory farms. (Yes, a corporate hog factory is now designated “critical infrastructure”!)

Legalized thuggery

It’s bad enough that corporate giants can buy laws that suppress our democratic rights, but now they’re doubling down on their assertion of autocratic authority by literally renting public police forces to rough up and arrest protesters.

You could’ve seen corporatized police in action last fall in Louisiana. Earlier that year, Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) had pushed Pelican State lawmakers to enact ALEC’s corporate infrastructure protections scheme. Turning protest into a felony crime was of urgent interest to ETP, for it had planned to ram a huge crude-oil pipeline through the fragile ecosystem of Atchafalaya Basin, over objections by environmentalists and residents.

Sure enough, when protest happened, St. Martin Parish sheriff’s officers moved in to attack, pepper spray, and choke the demonstrators. But, in fact, they weren’t actually functioning as public authorities. Yes, they came from the sheriff’s office, but they were among 58 deputies who’d been leased out to Energy Transfer Partners to enforce corporate law. They wore official law-enforcement uniforms, used taxpayer-issued weapons and tech equipment, presented themselves as public officers of the law, and arrested and jailed legitimate protestors in the name of the state. But, far from serving as agents of The People, these corrupted officers (a fourth of the sheriff’s entire force of deputies) were paid and directed by the corporation. They were taking ETP payments and perverting their public responsibilities into the private enforcement interests of the pipeline profiteer.

As rebels showed at the founding of our nation, when corporate powers autocratically twist the law to subvert the people’s basic rights, they can expect righteous revolution from the majorities they oppress.

The new laws punish such protest harshly. The Greenpeace activists, along with 20 others also arrested, now face felony charges, years in prison, and a permanent criminal record for violating Texas law by “interrupting” Big Oil’s operations–peacefully, for a few hours. So rather than protecting our fragile environment and Constitutional rights, America’s power elites are fabricating “property right” laws to protect corporate profiteers … from us!

These protest prohibitions have already been enacted by corporate-hugging politicos in Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas–and they’re presently being pushed in Colorado, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, with more expected in state legislatures during the 2020 sessions. When did We The People–in those states or anywhere else–vote to outlaw peaceful public protest against corporate excesses? When did we demand that lawmakers make it a felony crime for you and me to assemble at corporate sites to object boisterously, creatively, and effectively against profiteers who’re running roughshod over our values, livelihoods, environment, and … well, our lives? Of course, the answer is: Never. This is lawmaking by sneak attack, with craven, for-sale governors and legislators repressing The People’s rights without informing us, much less seeking our consent. King George III would be proud.

Who initiated these anti-democratic laws? Corporate lobbyists, that’s who. They’ve been working through ALEC, the secretive American Legislative Exchange Council that convenes closed-door tete-a-tete sessions conjoining its corporate members in a nationwide network of whorish state lawmakers willing to turn tricks for them. In January 2018, one of ALEC’s mating sessions produced a model bill called the “Critical Infrastructure Protection Act,” which would effectively sledgehammer peaceful protestors accused of corporate wrongdoing as though they were terrorists. Suddenly, virtually identical versions of ALEC’s pre-fab bill were introduced by its bawdy house legislators across the country.

To give cover to this self-serving repression, the corporate crowd has cooked up a public safety hoax. Colluding with the Trump regime, the FBI, unscrupulous media players like Sean Hannity, and ALEC itself, they’ve been running a fear-mongering campaign, claiming with hyperbolic fervor that hordes of eco-radicals are roving the land, intent on destroying America’s corporate infrastructure. This alliance cites–as a prime example of “destructive trespassers” interfering with corporate operations–the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s courageous standoff last year against the Dakota Access Pipeline that was being shoved through their sacred lands. Never mind that the pipeline corporation was the actual trespasser, the plutocratic screechers insist the poor profiteers must be protected by extraordinary anti-protest measures.

The Koch brothers even wrapped themselves in the cynical claim that they are concerned about “the safety of those exercising their right to demonstrate.” Because the protesters could get hurt, clucked a Koch lobbyist, criminal laws are needed to keep them from protesting. And, as ALEC was shopping its bill from state to state, it issued a bogeyman letter from fossil fuel giants urging lawmakers around the country to curtail the “growing and disturbing trend” of enviro-extremists attacking infrastructure. To buff its case, ALEC listed five such assaults. One involved a mild-mannered guy who merely cranked shut a pipeline valve in North Dakota, temporarily stopping the flow of toxic tar sands oil through the Keystone Pipeline. The other four cases were simply examples of incompetent vandalism by individuals who had mental health issues or were company insiders with workplace grievances.

"The issue isn't just jobs. Even slaves had jobs. The issue is wages." --Jim Hightower

These corporate protection laws are nothing but fraudulent scare tactics. Their backers say they’re necessary to prevent violence and vandalism. But wait!Stiff laws are already on the books against those crimes. And wait again! Those arrested in September’s Greenpeace protest committed no violence or vandalism.

The Texas hustle

In the last 25 years, the Lone Star State has become a protracted experiment in bad government, with top officials routinely kowtowing to corporate money–the people be damned. Thus, for a clear example of how today’s swarm of anti-democratic “critical infrastructure” laws came to infest our nation, look to Texas.

Note that no gubernatorial or legislative candidates in Texas have run on, or even mentioned, the absurd notion that We The People should be forced to surrender any of our Constitutional rights in deference to corporate supremacy. Nonetheless, shortly after the 2019 legislative session convened–BAM!–two ALEC acolytes, a GOP state senator named Brian Birdwell and a state rep named Chris Paddie, dropped that group’s corporate-written anti-protest bomb on both houses of the Texas Lege.

DO SOMETHING

As right-wing state legislatures attempt to shred our Constitutional right to peacefully protest, we citizens have a duty to resist. For more about these anti-democratic trends and how to fight back, check out:

Greenpeace is a leader in the global struggle to reverse climate insanity. One of its projects, Polluter Watch, monitors the latest egregious actions of the fossil fuel industry.

The Justice Collaborative works to “reform the components of our criminal justice system that are costly, counterproductive, and cruel.” Sign up for its info-packed email newsletter at theappeal.org.

The good folks at The Center for Media and Democracy do us all a great service by tracking the insidious corporate dirty work of the American Legislative Exchange Council. CMD’s website, ALEC Exposed, reveals the “model bills” pushed by ALEC to advance corporate interests at the expense of the common good.

Then came Greg Abbott, the notorious corporate-coddling governor, pushing the bill with a vengeance. And why not? Greg’s top donors are–surprise!–oil and gas corporations that pumped more than $10 million into his 2018 election bid. His 2019 legislative push was made in cahoots with Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Koch Industries, Shell, Valero, and other petro-powers that unleashed a lobbying barrage on legislators, successfully pressuring them (and effectively bribing many with the implied promise of future donations) to put corporate interest over the public interest.

The repressive Texas law took effect on September 1, 2019. Just 11 days later it was used to slap harsh felony charges on the Greenpeace protesters and others arrested for “interfering” with the movement of oil tankers. One politician who’s already getting grief from constituents for her despicable rush to lash the petrochemical protesters with severe felony charges is Houston district attorney, Kim Ogg. Elected in 2016 as a “bold” criminal justice reformer, she promised to reduce harsh, unfair sentencing and stop excessive bail for minor offenders.

In this case, Ogg violated both pledges. She grabbed Abbott’s brand-spanking-new “Save Big Oil” law to brand the participants as dangerous criminals. The DA is now demanding that all 31protesters be punished by lengthy state imprisonment for what clearly was a non-violent, peaceful exercise of their rights. She also asked that the court set bail for at least one of the defendants at the unconscionable level of “no lower than $100,000,” citing unsubstantiated “millions of dollars” in losses to the oil economy. Her claim of economic impact is wholly inappropriate to the bail process–intended simply to make sure defendants show up for trial. Rather, it is an outrageous attempt to impose punishment without a trial.

And here’s yet another twist: Early this year, following several oil refinery fires and spills of industry waste into the ship channel, DA Ogg was granted county funding to hire four new prosecutors and four support staffers specifically to handle crimes of environmental pollution. Now she’s prosecuting people who protest the polluters. What might be behind Ogg’s prosecutorial zealotry? Call me cynical, but I’m guessing that $70,000 in campaign cash from major oil industry donors–and her reasonable expectation of more to come for her re-election bid next year–could be persuasive motivators.

This story, however, is far bigger than one wayward DA and one bunch of right-wing state officials cracking down on public dissent. The lesson here is that repressive laws don’t just sit there on the books, they metastasize. Bad actors disseminate and use them to perpetrate enormous harm to good people and to democracy itself. This bad new law–written in the dark by self-serving, destructive corporate elites and hastily enacted by corrupt officials funded by those elites–is rapidly spreading across the country, with little public awareness. Overly ambitious and/or unscrupulous lawmakers and prosecutors everywhere are seizing it to imprison legitimate protesters and chill everyone’s willingness to assert our First Amendment rights. It is a direct assault on democracy by a voracious corporate plutocracy.

Going all in

And yet, I’m betting on democracy–because of the American people’s innate, Sam-Adams-style rebelliousness. I think of champions like Cherri Foytlin down in southwest Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin swamp, along the final leg of the Dakota Access Pipeline that carries oil fracked in North Dakota to a Louisiana refinery and then shipment, primarily, to China. Last year, Foytlin and others tried to stop Energy Transfer Partners–a notorious, out-of-state profiteer–from crisscrossing this beautiful and life-sustaining wetland with the polluting pipeline. She and other activists spent weeks in “sky pod” platforms they had built 35 feet in the air, tied to native cypress trees. Even though the private landowner had OKed the pods, authorities arrested the protesters in August and September for “trespassing.”

It was the first use in the nation of ALEC’s democracy-repressing ban on interfering with “critical infrastructure.” A Dine (Navajo) and Latinx who is part of the Indigenous Women’s Council of L’eau Est La Vie, Foytlin, a could face five years in prison. But don’t think that’s going to intimidate her. As she says, “They think that by upping the punishment they’re going to keep people from protesting. But what will happen is we’re going to do things that are more worth getting the felony [charge]. Because now, if we’re going to jail, then damn it, we’re going to go all in.”

https://www.salon.com/2015/03/22/vulture_capitalists_are_picking_us_dry_why_consumer_debt_buyers_are_on_the_rise_partner/

no lnx

Vulture capitalists are picking us dry: Why consumer debt buyers are on the rise

The great recession laid waste to the U.S. economy. Now debt collectors are feasting on the carrion

JIM HIGHTOWER

MARCH 22, 2015

Good news, people: The "boom" is back! Yes, good times are here again, thanks to an economic boom that's being generated by (of all things) bad times.

As you might know from your own experiences, tens of millions of Americans have been hit hard, knocked down and held down in recent years by the collapse of jobs and wages. This calamity has led to a second blow for millions of the same families, who find themselves suddenly buried in piles of overdue bills for credit card charges, student loans and other consumer debt.

But the good news is that there's a bright silver lining in that dark financial cloud. Only, it's not for the indebted families, but for a booming breed of finance hucksters known as consumer debt buyers. Believe it or not, in the warped world of high finance,"There's gold in them thar hills" of bad debt, and where there's gold, there are diggers.

Whenever a corporation issues a statement declaring that it's committed to "treating consumers fairly and with respect," chances are, it's not.

After all, why say such a thing, when actually practicing it would make a statement unnecessary? Indeed, with names like Encore Capital Group and Sherman Financial, these miners of human misery buy bales of these unpaid bills from banks and other lenders, paying pennies on the dollar. Then they unleash packs of their hard-nosed, aggressive collectors on the families. If they still can't extract payment, the corporate debt profiteers turn to their meanest dog: The courts.

Debt firms routinely file thousands of lawsuits a day against financially devastated Americans. They know that most debtors can't understand the legal gibberish filed against them, can't afford a lawyer, can't take time off to go to a court hearing and can't mount an effective defense against the corporate lawyers. So, some 95 percent of these lawsuits produce default judgments against hapless borrowers -- meaning debt buyers can then confiscate the wages of borrowers or freeze their bank accounts.

This boom in vulture capitalism is disgusting -- but, worse, it's subsidized by us taxpayers! We pay for the judicial system -- the judges, courtrooms and endless rounds of hearings. Predatory debt corporations have perverted our so-called justice system into their own subsidiary for squeezing profits out of destitute debtors.

This is why New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has started going after these for-profit corporate debt collectors. He found that Encore, based in San Diego, filed nearly 240,000 lawsuits against debtors in a recent four-year period, using the courts as its private collection arm. Problem is, Encore's bulk filing of lawsuits against the hard-pressed borrowers are rife with errors, out-of-date payment data, fabricated credit card statements, etc. With debt buyers scooping up millions of overdue bills each year from lenders, tons of them are missing original loan documents, payment histories and other proof of debt.

Debt predators, however, scoot around this lack of facts by simply having their employees sign affidavits asserting that the level of money owed is accurate. Judges, overwhelmed by the unending flood of lawsuits filed by Encore et al, have accepted those affidavits as true, thus ruling in favor of the corporations. But Schneiderman found that -- Surprise! -- affidavits were simply being rubber-stamped by company employees, with no effort to ensure the truth of the information. An employee of one large debt-buyer testified that his corporation ran an assembly-line scheme in which he signed about 2,000 affidavits a day.

This is no minor scam -- 1 in 7 adults in the U.S. is under pursuit by debt collectors. It's hard enough for struggling families to claw their way out from under the economic crash without having lying, cheating predator corporations twist the court system to pick their pockets and shut off their hope of recovery.

JIM HIGHTOWER

Jim Hightower's most recent book is "Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush." He produces a monthly newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown, and a syndicated daily radio commentary.

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Health care for corporate profits — not people

Written by Jim Hightower / Creators.Com February 13, 2020

When grassroots groups rise up against the corporate establishment trying to win some specific progressive change for the common good, the odds against them can seem daunting. As an old saying puts it: Where there’s a will … there are 1,000 won’ts.

Those won’ts tend to be moneyed powers making a killing from the status quo, so they’re dead set against any change. Such has certainly been the case in the decadeslong political struggle to ensure that every man, woman and child in our country gets decent health care as a human right. Today, even though we Americans pay by far the highest price for health care, most people are denied that right by our country’s profiteering, corporate-run medical industry, which treats care as a privileged commodity.

So many families are left out and maltreated by this dysfunctional system that more than 70% of Americans (including a majority of Republicans) now support replacing it with a “Medicare for All” publicly financed system that provides full health coverage for everyone, even as it saves us money.

So here come 1,000 screaming won’ts, rushing out to crush the people’s will. Such usual clusters of far-right plutocratic power as the Koch brothers’ billionaire club, Karl Rove’s political monkey wrenchers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce clique of giant corporations have deployed their forces. But the present system is so bad, and public support for Medicare for All has grown so large so fast, that the usual corporate dismissal of such ideas wasn’t working, spooking the profiteers.

Time for a powerhouse front group! Two years ago, the corporate won’ts met secretly in downtown Washington to set up an industrywide PR/lobbying juggernaut, giving it the stealth name of Partnership for America’s Health Care Future. Of course, what they care about is the future of their rip-off profits, and they’ve committed hundreds of millions of dollars and hired an army of more than 200 lobbyists to pound the public and Congress with a nuclear level of propaganda and raw political deceit.

This Partnership of Profiteers is Washington politics at its worst — a handful of cynical self-interests using cloaks, dark money and lies to rig the system for corporate profits at the expense of human health and political morality.

As former President Lyndon Johnson used to say about special interests trying to get his support to pass some blatantly self-serving legislation: “I may not know much, but I do know the difference between chicken s— and chicken salad.”

Yet, chicken manure is all that the corporate health complex has to work with as it frantically tries to defend its current system of mass malpractice. After all, as most Americans have learned the hard way, the corporatized “care” of profiteering insurance giants, Big Pharma and hospital chains grossly overcharge us while constantly trying to shortchange or outright deny care to millions of our families.

So, unable to win public support on their own merit, the corporatists and their hired political hacks are going all out to continue their profit gouging and keep control of America’s dysfunctional system. They’re running a multimillion-dollar PR and lobbying campaign of lies to trash and kill all reforms that would deliver quality, comprehensive care to (SET ITAL) everyone (END ITAL), at far less cost than they can deliver.

The profiteers masquerading as a Partnership for America’s Health Care Future warn ominously that such reforms as Medicare for All and a public option for health insurance would take away people’s “choice” and their “control” over health care.

Hello … we presently have no choice or control. Our “care” is managed by a handful of drug and hospital monopolists whose primary objective is not improving our health but fattening their profits. And the undeniable, ugly truth is that the “Partnership” fattens its profits by shortchanging our care.

That’s one reason the American Medical Association and others are dropping out of the “Partnership’s” political front. Honest health care practitioners don’t want to be part of its fraud and its chicken manure PR campaign.

Populist author, public speaker and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes “The Hightower Lowdown,” a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.

what if you were to own your own power company?

Jim Hightower / Creators.com

Well, maybe you can’t afford an oil well, but what if you could own something even bigger — an entire electric utility?

Jim Hightower: Can ‘powerless nobodies’ fight the corporate powers?

Written by Jim Hightower December 21, 2019

The many sparkling bays along the Texas coastline of the Gulf of Mexico have long provided both a working-class living and a valued lifestyle for generations of shrimpers, oysterers and other fishing families. People and seafood, however, are not the only creatures here, for such wildlife as alligators and snakes also call many of these interconnected waterways home. Yet, by necessity and experience, the hardy people of the water have figured out how to share the bays so all creatures can get along.

But in the 1980s, a strange and invasive new critter entered Lavaca Bay, near the town of Port Comfort. Far from getting along, this species proceeded over the years to devour whole harvests of seafood, along with the livelihoods of local Gulf communities. This marauder was not some monster from the deep but a massive, 45,000-acre factory looming over Lavaca Bay. It is the Formosa Plastics Corporation, founded by the richest man in Taiwan.

As its name implies, Formosa is not here for seafood. It is the world’s second largest fabricator of polyvinyl chloride,the tiny, highly toxic pebbles and powders used to make the gabillions of plastic bags, pipes, bottles, etc. that are choking the Earth. For decades, the Formosa plant has cavalierly been dumping trillions of these poisonous pebbles and tons of the polyvinyl powders into its wastewater — which end up in Lavaca Bay.

That poisonous content then spreads to other bays, nearby waterways, the Gulf itself … and into the shrimp, oysters, fish and other creatures living there. The result has been species vanishing from these waters, creating economic and social devastation for families and port communities that rely on nature’s bounty.

Wait, isn’t this against the law? Of course, but petrochemical behemoths like Formosa have corrupted the law, turning Texas lawmakers and environmental regulators into their puppets. When leaders won’t lead, The People must, and that’s exactly what’s happening in this case. A defiant, determined former fourth-generation shrimper named Diane Wilson, along with a scrappy environmental coalition on the Texas Gulf Coast, have just won the largest citizen environmental lawsuit in U.S. history, forcing Formosa to stop its gross contamination of the bay, the local economy and the law.

It’s good to have a happy-ending story for the holidays — one that’s not sugar-plum sappy but genuinely uplifting.

It “feels like justice,” said Wilson in early December when a federal district judge OK’d a $50 million pollution settlement against Formosa Plastics Corporation. Judge Kenneth Hoyt, a Ronald Reagan appointee, had previously ruled that the Taiwan plastics conglomerate was a “serial offender” whose violations of America’s Clean Water Act were “extensive, historical, and repetitive.” How the case got there is as important as his ruling.

Wilson, the indefatigable local shrimper, had been trying for some 30 years to get state and national officials to stop Formosa from dumping poisonous plastic chemicals into the Lavaca Bay ecosystem. The corporation’s deliberate contamination was destroying seasonal seafood harvests upon which she and thousands of Gulf Coast fishing families relied. She was ignored by those in power and then ridiculed and then demonized. Yet this lady of the sea wouldn’t quit. She kept speaking out, mounted hunger strikes and even tried to sink her own beloved shrimp boat in the bay as a public protest.

Nothing. But then, backed by a volunteer network of regional environmentalists and a savvy group of nonprofit legal service lawyers, Wilson filed the private citizens lawsuit in July 2017 that came to trial this spring in Judge Hoyt’s courtroom, finally producing an overdue measure of justice. The $50 million settlement doesn’t go to Wilson or the other plaintiffs but to projects that will revitalize local marine ecosystems and create a shrimping and oyster cooperative for local families. It also will pay for citizen-group monitoring of Formosa’s compliance with the judge’s orders for “zero discharge” of its plastic pollutants.

Even more significant than the money that the Formosa settlement provides, this victory sets a major legal precedent to advance other citizen lawsuits against polluters, requiring that the polluters (not taxpayers) pay for their messes. Who needs Santa Clause when “We the People” can deliver such democratic gifts to ourselves? For information on the details and impact of this remarkable people’s victory, go to the Texas RioGrande Legal Aid website.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/the-plutocrats-most-effective-secret-weapon-is-the-u-s-tax-code/

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The plutocrats’ most effective secret weapon is the U.S. tax code

Written by Jim Hightower / Creators Syndicate November 12, 2019

I should start this homily on inequality by distinguishing income from wealth. Income is your annual wages or salary, as well as your earnings from a business, pension or government benefits such as Social Security, etc.

As the average U.S. worker’s real wages have stagnated for more than a decade, income disparity has become enormous. The bottom 90% of us average $30,000 a year, while the top 0.01% and 0.001% (about 1,400 taxpayers) rake in average annual incomes of $35.1 million and $152 million, respectively.

Meanwhile, even mediocre CEOs pocket many millions a year, and the greediest Wall Street hucksters annually amass more than $1 billion in booty. Until relatively recently, the ethical standard was for workers to gain a proportionate share of the income growth we generate. But in the last dozen years, the rich have been gobbling more and more of the total income pie, so the bottom half of Americans now get only 14%.

As gross as income inequality is, though, it’s dwarfed by the lesser-known wealth disparity that has engulfed our land, mocking our egalitarian pretensions.

Wealth is your net worth, the total financial value of every asset you own: your home(s), business, stocks, cash, real estate, cars, yachts, jewels, gold, art, toys and … well, everything, minus debts.

Startling statistic: 1 in 5 Americans have zero net worth — or less. Many of us owe more than we own and, living paycheck to paycheck, can’t get ahead to build a nest egg.

More startling statistic: U.S. wealth disparity is the greatest of any advanced economy in the world, with the richest 1% holding more of our nation’s wealth than the bottom 90% of us.

Even more startling: Just three Americans — Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway) — possess more personal wealth ($248 billion) than the entire bottom half. Yes, more than 165 million of us combined.

The rapidly widening divide between the rich and the rest of us is neither natural nor accidental. During the past half-century, myriad corporate and governmental decisions — from labor law to campaign finance regulations — have methodically slanted America’s economic and political systems so that money and power flow from the many to the few. The plutocrats’ most effective and least reported-on tool is America’s tax structure.

For most of us — workers, professionals, farmers, small-business folks, etc. — income taxes are generally straightforward. The rich are different. Multimillionaires and billionaires don’t usually draw the bulk of their fabulous incomes from paychecks but from their enormous financial assets, i.e., their wealth. This inherited or accumulated wealth generates “capital income” — and further wealth — with little or no work by the asset holder.

As the Center for American Progress’ excellent report “Ending Special Tax Treatment for the Very Wealthy” details, the moral basis of U.S. tax policy has been perverted since the 1980s by legislative and regulatory twists that tax work but let these massive accretions of wealth skate by virtually untouched. Thus, the ultrarich, who benefit the most from our country’s economy and public infrastructure, pay the smallest proportion of their incomes to sustain it.

Today’s tax laws offer a carnival of loop-the-loops, whirligigs and other tax-free joyrides for those who’ve stockpiled capital income. For example, while you might pay the top tax rate of 37% on ordinary income, someone selling a capital asset like stock pays only 20% tax on income from that sale.

Nearly 70% of such capital gains are made by America’s richest 1%,who reap trillions of dollars a year in savings through such special tax treatments. This windfall allows them to amass and concentrate even more of America’s wealth in their sheltered accounts and buy the political clout to push through laws that the great majority oppose — such as 2017’s Trump-McConnell trillion-dollar tax giveaway to the rich. (Facing overwhelming public opposition, the GOP wrote the bill behind closed doors, allowed no public hearings and rammed it into law on a partisan vote.)

And round and round it goes … unless and until we stop it.

Read the Center for American Progress’ report.

Center for American Progress’ report.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/why-we-must-ignore-the-cries-of-doom-from-corporate-boardrooms-and-start-fixing-our-unequal-country/

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Why we must ignore the cries of doom from corporate boardrooms — and start fixing our unequal country

Written by Jim Hightower / Creators Syndicate October 15, 2019

When Jesse Jackson ran a strong populist campaign for president in 1988, advocating bold new policies and programs to address inequality, establishment skeptics scoffed, “Where ya gonna get the money?” Jackson answered directly: “Get it from where it went.”

He meant from corporations and the rich, which had been rigging the economic system and government policies to shift income and wealth from the workaday majority to themselves. Thirty years later, that shift has become an avalanche, with income and wealth inequality reaching the plutocratic excesses of the Gilded Age. Just three men — Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett — now own more of the nation’s wealth than the 165 million Americans who make up the bottom half of our population.

This extreme — and expanding — separation of the few from the many is an economic, social and moral disaster in the making, which is why today’s progressive policymakers are calling for big, forward-thinking populist solutions, ranging from free higher education to a Green New Deal. But again, the smug forces of the status quo scoff, “Where ya gonna get the money?”

The answer is the same one Jackson offered decades ago, but there are now three big differences: (1) The voracious grabbiness of the uber-rich has become ever more obscene and offensive, obvious to the general public; (2) From both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, we now have detailed, viable, easy-to-understand proposals for a wealth tax on multimillionaires and billionaires to pay for the structural changes needed to open opportunities for the poor and middle class; and (3) There is now wide and enthusiastic public support for a wealth tax. A recent poll found two-thirds of Americans (including a majority of Republicans) favor Warren’s plan for a tax on those who have fortunes exceeding $50 million.

Inequality will not fix itself. As the American majority has had to do periodically in our history, We the People must intervene to keep greed and wealth concentration from suffocating our society’s essential democratic values of fairness, justice and opportunity for all. A wealth tax is the place to start, for the rich are different from you and me. For one thing, they’re rich.

Among the superrich, though, there tends to be a peculiar sense that they are especially deserving, as though their net worth is a testament to their true worthiness. Thus, they seem to desperately cling to the very idea of being extremely wealthy — and to accumulating more wealth as the measure of a live well lived. This, then, leads to one very specific difference between them and us: Most of us favor the wealth tax to help bridge the gaping chasm of inequality in our society; they do not.

Indeed, the shrieks of abject horror, the gnashing of teeth, the cries of doom coming from corporate boardrooms, country clubs and defenders of the plutocratic order would be comical if they weren’t so pathetic. They exclaim that such a tax will “depress” business confidence, “destroy” entrepreneurial motivation, “dis-incentivize” investment, “sap” innovation, “punish” success and — get this — “spur” a wave of divorces! The psyches of the rich are so fragile, goes this line of bull, that a tiny tax on people with more than $50 million in wealth would keep them from getting out of bed in the morning.

Jamie Dimon, a billionaire Wall Street banker, disingenuously asserted that superwealthy people like him would “be happy to pay more in taxes.” But he feared the government would just squander it on giveaways “to interest groups and stuff like that.” I have to admit that Dimon does know his “stuff.” He weaseled billions of dollars in bailout money from our government in 2007 to keep his bank from collapsing due to Wall Street fraud, mismanagement and greed.

Far from squandering wealth-tax revenues on corporate giveaways to make elites like Dimon even richer, those supporting the tax specifically call for the money to fund access to higher education for every American who wants it, Medicare for All, grassroots jobs to repair and extend our national infrastructure, universal child care and other direct efforts to restore the common good. To help advance passage of the wealth tax — and our nation’s democratic ideals — check out Citizens for Tax Justice.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/how-corporate-profiteers-use-the-ideology-of-greed-to-win-big-while-killing-our-jobs-and-livelihoods/

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How corporate profiteers use the ideology of greed to win big — while killing our jobs and livelihoods

Mike Mozart

Written by Jim Hightower October 9, 2019

Here’s a recipe for you: Chop up 6 Oscar Meyer wieners, stir in 1 cup of Heinz ketchup, blend with 1/2 cup each of Cool Whip and Maxwell House Coffee, sprinkle a 1/2 cup of Planters peanuts over the mixture, add 3 spoonfuls of A.1. Steak Sauce and then top it off with a jar of Cheez Whiz and blast it in the microwave.

Sound like a gloppy mess? It would be if anyone could stomach the idea of making it, but an even messier version of the glop was cooked up in 2015 by corporate profiteers. That’s when Kraft Foods Group was merged with H. J. Heinz,thus conglomerating more than 200 brand-name food products — including all of the above — into one $28 billion-a-year behemoth. The combination was hailed at the time as a whiz-bang deal, a product of sheer corporate and financial genius that would generate extraordinary efficiencies, growth and profits, proving that bigger is always better.

Um … apparently not. Four years later, Kraft Heinz’s sales have slumped, profits are tumbling, its stock price has plummeted by half in the last year, investors are bailing out, its products are losing market share, shareholders are suing, regulators are investigating, employees are increasingly dispirited, and … well, as some business journalists have put it, the megamerger is a megamess.

This is not the work of inexperienced, incompetent corporate managers inside Kraft or Heinz but of a couple of highly touted Wall Street “geniuses” who’ve amassed personal fortunes in the global corporate merger game. The Kraft Heinz consolidation was engineered from outside by a Brazilian corporate takeover outfit named 3G, in cahoots with U.S. buyout buccaneer Warren Buffett.They are ideological disciples of the old orthodoxy that the sole responsibility of corporate executives is to jack up the stock price and profits for big shareholders — in this case, themselves. Their self-serving approach to increasing Kraft Heinz’s profits was to squeeze “costs,” meaning squeezing out experienced managers, workers, product development and the vibrancy of the corporation itself — which has steadily squeezed out their own profits.

This old model of self-enrichment through corporate takeover, consolidation and contraction turns out to be not just bad morals but bad business. It’s time for us, the media and public officials to start saying “NO!” to merger mania.

Last spring, a lawn care company advertised a special deal: “$50 OFF.” Off of what? In small print, the ad explained: “Off of free services.”

I think of that twisted advertising hustle when I see yet another corporate megamerger being announced with great hoopla.

The grinning CEOs of the merging giants promise everything, but — as we’ve learned from promises made by merging airlines, banks, drugmakers, etc. — they’ll most likely deliver less than nothing. Four years after the Kraft Heinz colossus merged, it has become a shamble, far less than either had been separately. What happened? Greed and Wall Street’s cost-cutting BS took over the executive suite.

3G had been the primary driver of the Kraft Heinz merger, and its top honchos quickly replaced the previous managerial teams with their own financial hotshots, who imposed a rigid bit of business school humbuggery called “zero-based budgeting.” It amounted to the practice of corporate thuggery — cut employees, slash expenses, divert revenues to the new owners, buy up other corporations … and repeat the plunder.

Suddenly, instead of focusing on improving products and customer satisfaction, Kraft Heinz employees were riveted on the minutia of cost-cutting. (The regime’s miserliness was exemplified by its removal of company-made nut and cheese snacks that had been offered for free at employee meetings). Research and new-product development budgets were whacked, seven processing plants were closed, thousands of workers were offed, and employee morale plummeted.

Also, 3G’s money manipulators had no clue about sweeping changes that were remaking the packaged food industry, especially the rise of smaller, more innovative companies that were delivering the healthier, less processed, better-tasting products consumers wanted. So Kraft Heinz’s “iconic” brands soon became perceived as simply old, losing consumer appeal, market share and profits. Adding insult to injury, last month, 3G started bailing out of its disastrous corporate creation, selling 25 million of its shares at a loss.

In June, 3G installed a new CEO, promising to right the ship, but he seems to be offering more of the same old corporate BS. “To truly change the direction of a business like ours,” he recently babbled, “we need to understand the future.”

Hey, chief. First, look to your past and try to learn that you don’t build by mindlessly destroying.

Kraft w

Each of the 11 Greenpeace activists involved in the ship channel protest, along with the 20 others who were also arrested, now face years in prison and a permanent criminal record for “interrupting”Big Oil’s operations for 18 hours. So rather than protecting our fragile environment and constitutional rights, America’s power elites are defending corporate profits — from us!

When did We the People vote to outlaw peaceful public protest against corporate excesses? When did we demand that lawmakers in Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas make it a felony for us to assemble and speak out at corporate sites to protest profiteers who’re running roughshod over our values, livelihoods, environment and … well, our lives?

Answer: Never. Yet, behind our backs, for-sale lawmakers in those states and many others are taking big bucks from oil giants, utilities, industrial ag outfits and other for-profit entities to pass corporate-written laws that criminalize protest actions against their greed. The laws assess inordinate jail time and exorbitant fines for the vague offense of “interrupting” or “interfering with” the operations and infrastructure of corporations that despoil, contaminate, violate and otherwise abuse us, the planet and everything else that gets in the way of another dime in profit.

Where did these anti-democratic, corporate-coddling laws come from? ALEC, the secretive American Legislative Exchange Council, which convenes closed-door tete-a-tete sessions to link its corporate members with a nationwide network of whorish state lawmakers willing to do tricks for them. In January 2018, ALEC produced a model bill called the Critical Infrastructure Protection Act, which would effectively sledgehammer peaceful protestors of corporate wrongdoing as though the demonstrators were terrorists. Suddenly, virtually identical versions of ALEC’s plutocratic/autocratic bill were introduced in 22 state legislatures. Nine have already been enacted, usually with little public notice or participation.

The Texas version, which took effect Sept. 1, was used just 11 days later to slap harsh felony charges on the Greenpeace protestors and the 20 others who were also arrested during the nonviolent symbolic shutdown of the Houston Ship Channel.

The two primary sponsors of the Texas anti-democracy legislation are ALEC adherents. The corporate powers that formally lobbied it through the legislature included Chevron, Dow, Exxon, Koch Industries, Shell and various industry consortiums, ranging from pipeline builders to poultry factories. And the legislation was forcefully backed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, whose top industrial donor group is — surprise! — oil and gas, which pumped more than $10 million into his 2018 election campaign.

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Trump’s big farmer grift: He’s giving millions to the rich while starving the poor

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/trumps-big-farmer-grift-hes-giving-millions-to-the-rich-while-starving-the-poor

Written by Jim Hightower / Creators Syndicate August 15, 2019

Donald Trump loooooves farmers. We know this because he says so. “Farmers, I LOVE YOU!” he declared in December. And we’ve learned that whenever The Donald says something, it’s true — even when it’s not.

These days, he’s loving farmers to death. Trump has ignored the obvious need to get monopolistic price-fixing bankers, suppliers and commodity buyers off their backs. And he’s ineptly playing tariff games with China and other buyers of U.S. farm products, causing exports and farm prices to tumble. The result is that our ag economy is tumbling into a deep ditch, slamming farm families and rural America with a rising tsunami of bankruptcies.

Adding crude insult to economic injury, Trump’s doofus of an ag secretary, Sonny Perdue, laughed at farmers, branding them “whiners” for opposing his majesty’s disastrous policies.

So, needing a political “I love you” gesture, Trump has been sending big bouquets of money to some of his beloved farmers. Our money. Lots of it — $28 billion so far, in what he cynically (and comically) calls the Market Facilitation Program, otherwise known as a taxpayer bailout.

But TrumpLove turns out to be highly selective, with more than half of the government payments going to the biggest farm owners. The Department of Agriculture initially announced a $125,000 limit on the amount any one farm could get, but every Trump deal seems to have a gimmick in it to give a special break to the slickest operators. The slickum in this deal is that assorted members of a family can claim to be owners of the same farm and be eligible for bailout money, even if they do no actual farming and live in New York City! Thus, one Missouri farm family got $2.8 million worth of subsidy love from Trump, and more than 80 families topped half a million in payments.

Meanwhile, the great majority of farmers — 80% of eligible grain farmers — got zilch from Donald the Dealmaker. The smaller producers who are most endangered by his export collapse got less than $5,000. So Trump’s “Market Facilitation” is squeezing the many who are most in need while helping a few of the largest get even bigger.

While the Trumpistas are presently trying to plow a multibillion-dollar subsidy into big grain farms, they’re shockingly stingy when it comes to our society’s moral responsibility to make sure the least-wealthy among us get an adequate level of food. Their latest effort in the practice of mass minginess is to try literally taking food off poor children’s plates. Using a tangle of federal red tape, Trump ideologues and bureaucratic minions are intervening to prevent states from providing food stamp assistance to millions of their people.

According to federal rules, to qualify for food aid, a family of three should have an income under $27,000 a year. But with rents, utilities, health care and even food prices constantly rising, millions of Americans can’t make ends meet on such a low income. Thus, 40 states have stepped in to loosen that income restriction so families at least get the minimum nutrition humans need. Far from being welfare moochers (as far-right-wing extremists screech), these recipients overwhelmingly are working families, children, the elderly and Americans with disabilities. The benefit is hardly lavish; it averages only $127 a month, but even this modest outlay has proven enormously successful in mitigating poverty.

Congress actually authorized states to make such pragmatic income adjustments in a 1996 revamp of the law. But look out! Here comes Sonny Perdue again, rising up on his hind legs to proclaim that naughty state officials are using that authority as a “loophole” to circumvent Trump’s federal authority. So Sonny and Donnie are demanding that a whole new bureaucracy of food stamp “eligibility police” be set up to monitor the assets of hard-hit people who’re just trying to get adequate food on their tables. This nonsense will cost tens of millions of our dollars to harass the poor in an autocratic hope of nabbing a couple of hungry families who have a dime more in assets than miserly Trumpistas claim they should have.

What we have here is government by plutocratic authoritarians who’ll gleefully dole out millions to a wealthy family and then just as gleefully go out of their way to deny food to millions of poor families.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/jim-hightower-decodes-trumps-afta-nafta-trade-deal/

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Jim Hightower decodes Trump’s afta-NAFTA trade deal

Written by Jim Hightower August 10, 2019

“Keep your eye on the ball” is a core principle not only for baseball players but also for us commoners trying to assess exactly what the spinmeisters of global trade are hurling at us. Their deals are and always have been large-scale hustles, filled with hypocrisy, deceit and greed. Promoted as fair and good for all, they’re invariably rigged with profiteering schemes that lock into law advantages for corporations over the common good of consumers, the environment, labor, independent businesses, governments and all other democratic forces.

Further, they are works of deliberate deception, drafted in strict secrecy and couched in page after page of arcane legalese that intentionally obscures the corporate thievery so We the People don’t know that we’ve been had until it’s too late. They hide the ball to keep you, me and even Congress from seeing specifically who’ll profit and who’ll pay. So, heads up, for here comes another sucker pitch.

“A historic transaction,” Trump grandiloquently hailed his Afta-NAFTA handiwork in an April tweet, lauding the 1,809-page United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement as “the most important trade deal we’ve ever made by far.” Backed by a coalition of some 200 corporate and Wall Street powerhouses, Trump demanded that Congress quickly ratify the USMCA “so we can bring back our manufacturing jobs in even greater numbers, expanding American agriculture, protecting intellectual property.” “Once again,” swooned Fox personality Laura Ingraham, “Trump delivers.”

Yes, but what … and for whom?

Big Pharma: If the USMCA passes as currently drafted, it would (SET ITAL)require(END ITAL) the governments of the U.S., Mexico and Canada to guarantee — and even extend — Big Pharma’s monopoly price-setting power. Specifically, the deal gives drugmakers 10 years of exclusive marketing for critical “biologic” meds that millions of people need — in addition to the 20-year monopoly that U.S. patent laws already grant. Trump’s deal would prevent generic competitors from offering cheaper versions for an extra decade while also shackling Canadians and Mexicans to the pricing racket that Pharma already runs in the U.S.

Big Oil:Although the USMCA largely eliminates the anti-democratic and unjust system of dispute-deciding corporate-run “courts,” seven oil behemoths (including Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron) would retain their NAFTA-granted access to these odious tribunals. One particular concern is that the giants will use these kangaroo courts to block Mexican efforts to strengthen environment and health protections and address the climate crisis.

Big Bosses: The USMCA would finally outlaw Mexico’s notorious company-run “unions” that allow workers no control or even participation. While the deal prohibits these fraudulent labor units, it provides no way to monitor, much less enforce, corporate compliance.

Big Food: The original NAFTA included a literal gag rule. It allowed cheaply produced Mexican beef and other meat to be sold in the U.S. — even if it didn’t meet our food safety standards. Trump’s “fantastic” redo of NAFTA keeps this rule prohibiting our supposedly sovereign government from setting our (SET ITAL)own(END ITAL) health standards for meat sold to (SET ITAL)our(END ITAL) consumers. [country of origin labelling?

Congress must obviously kill this thing, right?

Hmmm … not so fast. Even with all the uglies and absurdities in the USMCA, progressive strategists see enough pretties and potential for fixes that it could become one of the only positives to emerge from Trump Hell. As Lori Wallach, head of Public Citizen’s savvy band of trade jujitsu artists puts it, “Improbably, things are going quite well.” Prettiest of all is the USMCA’s whacking down of NAFTA’s most repugnant component: “investor-state dispute settlement” tribunals. These autocratic, plutocratic, corporate-controlled “courts” empower multinational corporations to obtain unlimited taxpayer dollars through specious lawsuits claiming that their special NAFTA privileges are restricted by the people’s democratically enacted laws— laws intended to protect consumers, workers, the environment and other social/economic interests. The investor-state dispute settlement provision is an anti-democratic abomination, and gutting it would truly be a huge step forward — one worth! taking while we can.

Further, if we can strengthen the USMCA’s labor and environmental standards — and make them strictly enforceable — they might counter corporate America’s race-to-the-bottom outsourcing that converts middle-class U.S. jobs into Mexican sweatshop servitude. And of course, the absurd goodies for Big Pharma must be removed. But the fight, then, is not simply to reject the USMCA but instead to expose its flaws, democratize it and force improvements. That’s not easy, but it’s doable.

Yes, trade fights can be complex and tedious, but pay attention to this one. The USMCA is a momentous battle that’s more about people’s democratic power than trade. It unites folks across the left-right political spectrum, it’s worth the fight, and it’s winnable — if we team up to wrangle our Congress critters to oppose Trump’s corporatized version and add essential democratizing improvements. Let’s do it!

From kitchen tables worldwide, you can hear a chorus of parents chastising their children with the same refrain: “Stop playing with your food.”

Children aside, this rebuke needs to be loudly directed at the food fabricators of industrial agriculture. Corporate interests keep toying with the very nature of food — not to benefit consumers, family farmers, workers or the environment, but to fatten the profits of Silicon Valley tech giants, food monopolists and Wall Street financiers.

Meet Recombinetics, a high-tech gene manipulation corporation with bioengineers in its labs remaking farm animals — pigs, for example. Recombinetics wants to mess with the very DNA of Mother Nature’s oinkers to make them produce bigger litters to supply the pork factories of brand-name marketers. It is also genetically altering milk cows to withstand hotter weather so that climate change won’t reduce the output of huge dairy corporations.

This re-engineering of nature to build industrial Frankenanimals is being supported by such land-grant colleges as the University of California, Davis — your tax dollars at work! Of course, this corporate-government collusion faces a high hurdle in the marketplace, for consumers have demonstrated again and again that they don’t want the food they put on their tables tampered with by profiteering geneticists. The tamperers, though, have a solution to that problem: secrecy. The industry is lobbying lawmakers and regulators to outlaw any requirement that milk and meat produced by genetically altered animals be labeled as such. Better to keep consumers in the dark because… well, if given a free choice, people might reject Recombinetics in favor of natural food.

Rather than remake animals and remake the marketplace to benefit corporations that play with our food, let’s remake the corporate system that is trying to industrialize dinner. Corporate manipulators are not out to make food better or more affordable for us, but strictly to make it more profitable for them.

How’re you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen … Angus?

Not Angus the breed of cattle, and not the time-honored given name of many farm boys, but Angus the 1,000-pound “farmer of the future.” He’s actually not a he, but an it: a robot, toiling away on a hydroponic “farm” that is indoors, soilless and, yes, soulless. Angus is owned and programmed by a multimillion-dollar Silicon Valley startup named Iron Ox, and its homestead is hardly bucolic. It’s in an 8,000-square-foot concrete warehouse in a suburb south of San Francisco.

This farm bot is more of a heavy lifter than a heavy thinker. Basically, Angus wheels around the warehouse to lift, move and hand off large pallets of basil, bok choy and other produce to another robot that, so far, hasn’t earned a name. The human overseers of this robotic animal farm don’t wear John Deere “gimme caps,” but clean-room hairnets, apparently to prevent anything organic from contaminating the edibles or the robot.

Started by a Google engineer, Iron Ox hopes to install duplicates of its faux farm in metropolitan areas across the country. The obvious question is, Why? Well, for the greater good, claims the Googlite owner. “If we can feed people using robots, what could be more impactful than that?” Well, reconnecting our food system to nature, a democratic economy and human beings. The roboticists brag that local warehouses can provide fresher lettuce than what megafarms ship from thousands of miles away. But wait! Local farmers markets do that, do it even fresher and keep the consumer dollars in the community rather than siphoned off to Iron Ox and the Wall Street financiers of Angus robots.

In fact, the robotic indoor farm hucksters quietly concede that their real business plan depends on “sidestepping” the cost of human labor and local farm owners. Instead of spreading wealth to people and communities, their scheme concentrates food profits in a handful of absentee syndicators, rich investors and technology giants.

Deep in his digital brain, even Angus must know this is stupid.

corpshightower pdf 2/19

https://hightowerlowdown.org/article/as-we-gape-at-trumps-sideshow-corporations-are-picking-our-pockets/

...The dominance of these profiteering interests did not, of course, begin with Trump. For the past half century, they and their acolytes have steadily spread the pernicious legalistic fiction that a corporation’s sole obligation is to generate as much profit as possible for its shareholders (see *The Lowdown*, February 2016). Every administration since (Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama) has essentially accepted this ridiculous fairy tale as fact–and, to one degree or another, each has taken steps that have incrementally advanced the supremacy of corporate interests over all others.

But when Trump Inc. crashed into Washington–KABLOOIE!–incrementalism exploded into a government of agencies almost wholly owned and run by Wall Street bankers, CEOs, industry lobbyists, and corporate lackeys often plucked from the ranks of former congresscritters. Rather than seeking favors from government officials, corporate interests have now largely become the government. And while we gawk at the president’s monkeyshines, these gluttons are looting the people’s treasury and fast locking in a permanent American oligarchy.

Let’s look at a couple of their power grabs.

Where the money is

Famed bank robber Willie Sutton once explained that he busted into banks because “that’s where the money is.” What a small timer! Corporate thieves (including the biggest banks) know that the big scores are in the tax code and federal budget. So, seeing the Trumpsters as their inside enablers, America’s superrich establishment–from the Koch brothers to Fortune 500 CEOs–set aside their personal revulsion at our crude charlatan-in-chief to kiss-up, wooing him and his fanatical constituency to back their agenda of plutocratic plunder.

It’s working. The single legislative accomplishment of the guy who claimed to be a working-class hero is his 2017 Christmastime signing of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA). As most Americans now realize, the tax cut was not for them, but instead was a disgrace- ful trillion-dollar-a-year giveaway to corporate giants and their wealthiest shareholders. The Koch brothers alone invested $20 million on political ads and lobbying to pressure GOP lawmakers to unilaterally slash the corporate tax from 35 to 21 percent.

And why wouldn’t the Koch boys spend big on this bill? As calculated by Americans for Tax Fairness, the billionaire duo and their private corporation will pocket about $1.4 billion each year from this dodge. Likewise, hundreds of TCJA’s corporate backers are already making a killing. In just the first three quarters of 2018, big business quietly pocketed stunning tax savings they would have (and should have) paid to support America’s public needs:

Apple: $4.5 billion
AT&T: $2.2 billion
Bank of America: $2.4 billion
Verizon: $1.75 billion
Walmart: $1.6 billion

And what about the “jobs” part of the act? Its core promise was that CEOs would devote their huge tax gift to new jobs and pay raises for working stiffs. Indeed, in 2017, about three dozen brand-name giants funded a lobbying front, deceptively named Reforming America’s Taxes Equitably (RATE), to promote the notion that a tax break would “boost job creation.”

DO SOMETHING

“Based on last year’s irresponsible tax cut, Patagonia will owe [$10 million] less in taxes this year. …We’re … committing all $10 million to groups … finding solutions to the climate crisis.”

–Rose Marcario, CEO of outdoor clothing company Patagonia, November 2018

While the piggiest corporations gorge themselves at the public trough, a growing number of their corporate cousins have stood up for a better way of doing business: B Corporations. The “B” stands for benefit and refers to their pledge to benefit workers, the community, and the environment. Patagonia (with almost $1 billion in annual sales) is a B Corp.

B Corps must have a legally binding, built-into-their charter commitment to sustainability and treating workers well. Every two years each B Corp must publicly report on its social and environmental impact to receive certification from non-profit B Lab. The B Corp community works toward lower levels of poverty and inequality, a healthier environment, stronger communities, and high-quality jobs with dignity. For more details and a list of B Corps, go to: bcorporation.net.

By looking for the B Corp label–and, of course, patronizing the local businesses in your home town–you can cast votes every day for a better system, even between elections.

But ThinkProgress.org found that in 2018 RATE members–including AT&T, Capital One, CSX, Ford, General Dynamics, Intel, Kimberly-Clark, Lockheed Martin, Macy’s, Northrop-Grumman, T-Mobile, Verizon, Viacom, and Walmart–have instead eliminated more than 100,000 US jobs. Verizon, for instance, promptly offered a “voluntary severance package” to 44,000 employees and offshored thousands of its US jobs to India. It was “an opportunity to find more efficiencies,” the CEO told workers, “and help expedite … an innovative operating model for our future.” Or to put it more simply: It was greed.

Ah … there you have it: Forget America’s fundamental values of justice and opportunity for all, and don’t expect even a modicum of honesty from rich shareholders and top executives. For example, Kevin Hassett, a far-right corporate ideologue chosen by Trump to head the White House Council of Economic Advisors, flat-out lied that the corporate gifts would spark “an immediate jump in wage growth” averaging as high as $9,000 a year.

Got yours yet?

So where did the money go? To the top. After all, only the tax giveaways were mandated–not a dime in obligations (not even thank-you notes) was written into law. With no strings attached and union voices largely hushed or marginalized, top executives and board members were free to allocate their corporations’ multibillion-dollar windfalls as they pleased. And–surprise!–it pleased them to spend it on themselves and their big investors, hiding their grubby motives behind “stock buybacks,” an accounting gimmick that hikes the pay of bosses who do nothing to earn it. The three-step fraud: (1) Humongous Incorporated gets a $1 billion tax gift from Uncle Sam. (2) HI quickly spends the booty to buy its own stock, which inflates the shares’ value. (3) Since HI top executives are awarded big chunks of company stock–abracadabra!–they can reap huge gains by selling that stock at the inflated price.

[Hidden Tidbit: As economist Paul Krugman notes, since foreigners own 35% of US corporate stocks, roughly a third of the tax cut supposed to “Make America Great Again” flowed abroad. Shhhhh … Trump and his fat-cat backers want to keep this secret.]

Workers, who mostly own no stock, gain little or nothing from these buyback scams. They’re another financial maneuver that cynically widens inequality, deepens the federal deficit, and weakens America’s economic potential. But today’s corporate ethic (shamelessly practiced by the president) is clear: Take the money and run. Buybacks in 2018, the highest number on record, were expected to top $1 trillion, effectively gobbling up all the first year Trump/GOP Jobs Act money. So, at the same time as workers’ real wages fall, CEO pay skyrockets. For example, as Politico reported last July:

Two weeks after AbbVie, a pharmaceutical giant, announced a $10 billion buyback in February, its stock price soared and eight top execs cashed in $27 million in stock.
Eight days after cigarette-maker Altria announced a $1 billion buyback, its CEO cashed in nearly $1 million in stock.
The day after T.J. Maxx stock price was boosted by a February buyback, a top executive sold $11 million in shares.
After Mastercard’s $4 billion stock buyback, its CEO cashed in for a personal payday of $44 million.
After Oracle jacked up its stock price with a $12 billion buyback, its co-CEO cashed in a whopping $250 million in shares.

Playing Monopoly for reals

Shouting “Down with big government,” today’s tea party Trumpateers claim to be tax rebels–direct descendants of the Boston bunch who boarded three British ships in 1773 and heaved their cargo of tea chests into the harbor. But, wait! That historic tea party wasn’t actually a tax protest. The audacious colonists were rebelling against the British East India Company’s tea monopoly that excluded local importers.

What the gutsy rebels were actually tossing was monopolistic corporate power. Get your heave-ho muscles in shape, for the monopolists are back, and they’re going for more than our tea; they’re rapidly locking up major economic sectors. The louder Trump touts his commitment to competition and free markets, the faster his corporate operatives, lobbyists, and congressional henchmen scheme to create cartels and combines. His justice department, regulatory agencies, monetary policies, tax rules, judicial appointees (especially Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch), and other inside players are all at work greasing the skids for the monopolization of America.

Wall Street wins

Remember candidate Trump berating Wall Street bankers as money-grubbing profiteers? “I’m not going to let Wall Street get away with murder. …We’re going to tax Wall Street,” he declared during the 2016 race, promising to put those banks in their place—which turned out to be looting our economy!

According to an analysis by the Associated Press, before the Trump tax cuts, the Big Six paid 28-31% of their annual income in corporate taxes. But in the first quarter of results after the cuts, the reported tax rate of JPMorgan Chase was just 18.3%; Goldman Sachs, 17.2%; and Citigroup, 23.7%. Trump’s tax cuts saved the Big Six banks a combined $3.6 billion dollars in the first quarter of 2018 alone and boosted their net profits by an equivalent amount. According to the FDIC, the cuts enriched the banking sector as a whole by $6.6 billion.

Imagine what Trump would do for these giant banksters if he didn’t hate them!

This era’s corporate dominance did not, of course, begin with Trump. The merger wave swelled in the Reagan years, but since his Federal Trade Commission stopped collecting industry consolidation data in 1981, its full extent is hidden. But we do know, thanks to public interest watchdogs, that a tsunami of monopoly power now threatens our economy at the very time Trump Inc. is dismantling consumer protections and facilitating the rise of dominating behemoths in airlines, banks, computer tech, pharmacies, groceries, hospitals, meatpacking, media, oil, online sales, pharmaceuticals, railroads, software, telecom services, and other essential industries. While Americans are told to worship the magic of the free market, real markets are being hogtied by a handful of crony capitalist oligarchs.

High tech Two giants, Verizon and AT&T, control 69% of US cellphone service last year. Two others, Facebook and YouTube (owned by Google) have 64% of social network visits, and another two, Android (launched by Google) and Apple, control 99% of smartphone operating systems.

Banking

Five Wall Street mega-powers now control nearly half of all US financial assets; 20 years ago, the top five controlled only about 20%.

Air travel

In recent years six of the largest US airlines merged into three, which now control 50% of US flights.

Mass media

Three decades ago, 50 conglomerates owned 90% of media outlets; today, just 6 mega-monopolists control 90% of the market. America’s two largest newspaper owners are not even media chains, but Gatehouse Media and Digital First Media Wall Street hedge funds that now own some 670 papers, including dailies in Augusta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Denver, Phoenix, and St. Paul. And Digital First is now attempting to take over the Gannett chain of 100 more papers.

Wealth

As of August 2018, Apple’s stock value was greater than that of Bank of America, Boeing, Ford, Volkswagen, Walt Disney, and 20 other colossal corporations–combined. In 2015, just 30 super-sized corporations grabbed half the profits generated by all corporations listed on the stock market.

Miscellaneous

The two largest truck and bus manufacturers now control 62% of the market; the two largest drug store chains, shipbuilders, and mattress makers have over 60% of those markets, and the two largest home improvement chains control about 80% of the market.

The real target

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/campaign-end-on-election-day-movements-dont/

hightower

Campaigns end on Election Day. Movements don’t. Voting day is a time stamp for measuring our progress, and when the polls closed last Nov. 6, it was clear that the intensive organizing by grassroots groups throughout 2017-18 had paid off. But let’s not forget that it’s all the days in between elections that matter on Election Day. We’re like the farmers and gardeners who do grub hoe work through the summer for a good harvest in the fall. Let’s look at what we’ve learned.

Most political opinion writers assert that, with 2018 in the rear-view mirror, it’s time to focus our full attention on 2020’s supercalifragilisticexpialidocious presidential campaign. Given the exigencies posed by a deranged Trump, that’s an understandable instinct, but it’s wrong — at least for those of us who want to build a durable progressive movement with the public support needed to extend democratic government throughout America. For us, 2019 is the time to focus on … 2019! Already, thousands of races for mayor, county office, school board, legislature and more are gearing up.

Seeing them as inconsequential to big-picture politics, many Establishment beings scoff at these “lesser offices,” which are actually key to movement politics. They:

hold serious power for directly improving common people’s lives;
engender campaigns that tend to be more issue- and solution-oriented and less vulnerable to sabotage by right-wing ideologues;
(often) have broad authority, allowing for bold policy innovations;
are training grounds for future contenders for higher office;
are winnable with principled, low-dollar grassroots campaigns.

Indeed, these races are the essence of percolate-up politics: Build the farm team and presidents will follow. Even more important: Genuinely progressive policies will follow.

November tells us which offices we won, but January started the clock on what we actually gained. After all, the movement’s goal is not just to elect good people, but to enact good public policy. From my eight-year experience as Texas agriculture commissioner (elected 1982 and again in 1986), I can attest that the second goal does not necessarily follow the first. One major pledge of my campaign, for example, was to reduce pesticide poisoning of people and the environment and to promote organic production. Upon taking office, though, I was swarmed by chemical lobbyists, the Farm Bureau, powerful state officials, corporate media outlets and other intimidating forces of the agricultural poison complex, demanding that I “move to the middle of the road.” This furious onslaught was daunting, and my political resolve wobbled … until farmworker advocates and environmentalists confronted me. When a West Texas farmer friend scoffed, “Hell, Hightower, there’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos,” that perked me up. We rallied, pushed ahead, and achieved my campaign promise.

I see three distinct steps for getting good policies from officials who mean well but might back away under pressure. We, the movement, must:

1. Go inside with those we elect, providing aggressive public support, info, staffing and expertise to shore up the progressive agenda — that lobbyists and big donors will pressure our new officials to water down — and to expose the corporate powers trying to corrupt the people’s will.

2. Confrontour electeds when they drift, prodding them privately and publicly to be as bold as their promises.

3. Ride the momentum of our election victories to push — from inside and out — additional proposals for long-term structural changes to democratize America’s economic, social, and political systems.

You know your community and state. You know the people’s issues. You know your group’s talents and ingenuity. And you can see how progressive issues, candidates and movements are advancing! So this is no time to get sucked down into the swamp of Trumpism or surrender to bubbling right-wing fanaticism. Our task is to keep doing what brought us this far: organizing, harmonizing and mobilizing. Let’s keep at ’em!

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/save-us-postal-service-heres-corrupt-scheme-privatize-precious-american

Unable to find a fatal flaw in our far-flung public mail delivery network, the anti-Postal Service forces manufactured a fake flaw. In 2006, then-president George W. Bush, congressional Republican leaders, the powerful "privatizer lobby" (including FedEx, UPS and Wall Street speculators) and Koch-funded think tanks and Astroturf front groups colluded to put a one-of-a-kind paper "debt" on the books of USPS. Congress enacted a postal-service "enhancement" provision requiring the public postal corporation to pre-fund the health and pension benefits for all postal-service retirees 75 years in advance! Think about that. This arbitrary, wholly unprecedented, legislated requirement to pay now for the retirement benefits of future employees (including those not even born yet) has piled a false cost of about $5 billion a year on the debit side of the agency's balance sheet.

...

Hightower: Climate Activists Are Fighting the Right by Subverting Its Most Effective Campaign Strategy

This new conservation group chose its image both to symbolize the true-West commitment to defending nature and as a spoof on right-wing language perversion.

By Jim Hightower / Creators Syndicate July 20, 2018,

What's in a name? By definition, the name of a person, place or thing is its personal designation... a distinct way of being known to others. Unless, of course, it's the opposite -- a label meant to disguise who or what a person or thing really is. In other words, a fake name.

Hiding one's true identity can be done for many legitimate purposes, but it tends to be widely-used these days by scheming people or nefarious interests with... well, with something to hide, using a dishonest, Orwellian representation of themselves for villainous reasons. Two of the most notorious practitioners are common crooks and corporate front groups, which often are one and the same.

For example, Restaurant Workers of America is not made up of waiters and cooks. It's a front-group of chain-store owners who oppose raising the sub-minimum wage of their actual workers. Cloaking themselves as independent citizen advocates and adopting such patriotic-sounding names as Americans for Prosperity, these astroturf outfits run massive campaigns of deceit promoting policies and views that benefit the corporate sponsors at the expense of the public interest.

So, what should we make of a brand-spankin' new group with the incredible moniker ofCowboys for Liberty? What a positive name! Cowboys are seen as down-to-earth straight-shooters, and America is all about liberty. But wait, is this one of those Koch-funded, far-right-wing bands of angry, anti-government ranchers? Au contraire, as the old cowhands say. In fact, Cowboys for Liberty is an audacious, fun-loving network of hell-raising, climate-change activists who are out to expose, shame and defeat the corporate-serving profiteers behind the unconscionable climate-denier industry, instigated by Jim Marston of the Environmental Defense Fund.

With many of its members from Colorado, Montana, Oklahoma, Texas and other Western states, this new conservation coalition chose the cowboy image both to symbolize the True-West commitment to defending Mother Nature -- and as a spoof on the right-wing's intentional perversion of language and honest policies. One of their first targets? The most selfish of them all: climate-change deniers.

Yes, from time to time, a few individuals pop into the public eye who are so consumed by self-importance, self-righteousness, self-aggrandizement and all things selfish that they have no shame -- even when their narcissism does gross harm to others. These narcissists-doing-disastrous-damage are the climate-change denying clique of prominent polluters, politicos and propagandists are shamefully used their positions of power to enhance their own fame and fortune as glaciers melt, oceans rise, extreme weather expands, species perish and Earth itself spins toward being unlivable.

While these professional deniers acknowledge no shame, the feisty Cowboys have stepped forward to acknowledge it for them.They've established a Climate Deniers Hall of Shame, and it inducted its first class of infamous deniers. Among the honorees are Charles and David Koch, who've dumped more than $100 million into front groups spreading lies about climate change; Sen. Jim Inhofe, the dotty old dean of deniers, who has called global warming a conspiracy spawned by the Weather Channel; and the former CEO of Exxon Mobil,who secretly funded right-wing groups to issue hoked-up reports to discredit the science of climate change.

The Hall of Shame is fun, but it's not a prank. It's a real place to memorialize in perpetuity the names, faces and shameful actions of obtuse, avaricious individuals who've worked to put their petty selves above the very existence of humanity. Publicizing the nefarious efforts of these deniers reveals the importance of an informed and engaged citizenry. Otherwise, we end up ruled by a kakistocracy -- government by the worst people in our society.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/hightower-democracy-dying-america-were-now-under-rule-trumps-cronies

ALEC

sum update

Multibillionaires Charles and David Koch want nothing less than to supplant America's core democratic principle of majority rule -- the will of The People -- with their core plutocratic principle of inviolable property rights, also known as domination by the wealthy minority. Their notion is that "property" (accumulated wealth and the means to get it) is sacrosanct and cannot be restricted by the pesky majority for the Common Good. Cloaking their efforts with layers of dark-money front groups, the Koch brothers have used their enormous assets to mount a far-ranging, ultrasophisticated assault on American democracy.

From their early involvement in The John Birch Society (daddy Fred Koch being an early member), they continued their rightward march, and by the 1970s, both had plunged into the abyss of a laissez-fairyland plutocracy. With the fervor of religious cultists, they've devoted themselves to the cause of "liberty" -- by which they mean the government's only proper role is keeping the avaricious pursuits of the wealthy owner class free from any interference by you, me and the democratic "us." They believe that We The People can neither tax the riches of the owner class nor set rules on how it treats workers, consumers, nature ... and society as a whole.

Even more shocking than their arrogance is just how far they've come and are willing to go with this scheme. For nearly 40 years, they and their uber-rich allies have been battering the legal structures and mechanisms that give ordinary people some chance to control their own destinies. Among the brothers' goals are the following:

--Kill all restrictions on political spending by corporations and the rich.

--Suppress the voting rights of students, people of color, the elderly and others who tend to oppose Republican policies and candidates.

--Massacre labor unions.

--Eliminate the right of consumers, workers and others to sue corporations, forcing them instead into corporate-controlled arbitration.

--Rip to shreds the social safety net including food stamps, jobless benefits, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

--Ax regulations that protect people and our environment from corporate abuse.

--"Preempt" the right of local people to pass laws that corporations oppose.

--Subvert democracy through gerrymandering.

--Pack courts with pro-corporate judges.

The effect of these and hundreds of other national, state and local attacks is that the wealthy few are now grabbing evermore societal wealth and power, shattering America's commitment to the Common Good. It adds up to a coup -- and yet, because it has been built slowly and with deliberate stealth over decades, the public has not yet fully grasped the enormity, complexity and effectiveness of this unprecedented conspiracy of billionaires.

The Koch brothers understood early on that they would need to invest millions of dollars (their combined wealth is over $120 billion) over many years to package, perfume and surreptitiously push their unpopular anti-majority ideas on the public. Transforming their inherited fossil fuel fortune into Koch Industries, they freely tap this revenue directly and massively to finance their political agenda. And because that money is privately held, much of that spending is not publicly revealed.

And it's not just the brothers themselves at play here. The Koch-affiliated web of gazillionaire allies, The Seminar Network, aims to unite "the country's top business and philanthropic leaders behind a shared commitment to a ... free and open society." When some 500 donors gathered at a posh resort in January, Charles Koch boasted: "We've made more progress in the last five years than I had in the previous 50. ... The capabilities we have now can take us to a whole new level." The network has pledged to spend an additional $400 million on the 2018 elections ... including elections at the local and state levels.

And that's just for this year's elections. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Koch money goes into all sorts of foundations, business lobbying groups, dark-money groups, higher-education and high school groups (to promote the Koch worldview), astroturf groups like Americans for Prosperity, legislative bill mills like American Legislative Exchange Council that write pro-corporate legislation for states, think tanks (American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, The Heritage Foundation, Manhattan Institute and State Policy Network) and much, much more.

All is not lost, however. While our "watchdog" press seems committed to ignoring the anti-democracy impact of Koch money, there are independent reporters and researchers on that critical beat of the Koch-tentacled network. Check out Lisa Grave's work on the Kochs on the Documented Investigations website and at the Center for Media and Democracy (https://www.exposedbycmd.org/koch/). The Center for Responsive Politics has more info on where the Koch money goes. To fight back against the Kochs and fight for the Common Good, check out Our Revolution and Working Families.

https://www.alternet.org/activism/fed-democrats-usual-theres-whole-universe-progressive-groups-ready-take-reins

Last June, after Democratic candidates had lost four straight special Congressional elections (Rob Quist in Montana, James Thompson in Kansas, Archie Parnell in South Carolina, and Jon Ossoff in Georgia), America's purveyors of conventional political wisdom simultaneously jumped to the conclusion that the policies and message of Democrats were just too progressive for our nation of moderate-right voters. The Washington cognoscenti expressed dismay that, despite Trump's dismal public approval ratings and the nationwide surge of "Resist!" campaigns, the hapless Democratic Party was still unable to score any electoral victories. "Why Do Democrats Keep Losing in 2017?" queried a June headline in The Atlantic. "Democrats just went 0-4. When will they win?" asked a cynical CNN reporter. "It is a bit surprising that Democrats haven't managed a single victory yet," declared a University of Wisconsin election expert. "Panic is setting in on the left," exclaimed a Vox headline.

Really?

No, not really. The professional political observers are like cats watching the wrong mouse hole. They are so fixated on the minutia of Washington-centric politics that they're missing the much bigger story of transformative political changes that have erupted in every region of the country. Far from panicking, America's political left is organizing, strategizing, mobilizing ... and WINNING. Coalitions of local progressive activists (newly energized by an infusion of dynamic, creative young people and people of color) came together after the 2016 election. They recruited and trained candidates from their own ranks; methodically knocked on doors, having thousands of front-porch conversations with voters on basic issues; mobilized supporters for intensive election-day turn-out drives; and elected scores of audaciously populist mayors, council members, legislators, and other officials.

This is the mouse hole to watch, for it's where ordinary people -- those fed up with the corporate-rigged, business-as-usual politics and policies of both major parties -- are actively rebuilding democracy and beginning to produce real change. It's a nationwide rebellion made up of spontaneous local rebellions, each sparked by various specific grievances with America's ruling royalists. Linking these uprisings together is a shared determination to restore our nation's unifying ethic of the Common Good, a principle that my old daddy used to express this way:Everybody does better when everybody does better.

This burgeoning movement is not merely about protesting or lobbying the government -- it intends to become the government. It's a new politics embracing a three-front strategy I call R-I-P:

--Resist the Trumpeteers and corporatists of all parties who're imposing plutocratic rule over us commoners.

--Insist on enacting a positive, aggressively progressive people's agenda.

--Persist in organizing from the ground up to sustain both "little-d" democratic politics and "everybody" policies.

The most common characteristic of last year's progressive, populist candidates is that they were genuinely of the people, not career pols who were next in line. And they were not simply running for office, but running for specific economic, social and political changes to make America better for families and neighborhoods like theirs. They didn't need campaign consultants to tell them what to say and not to say, for they were politicized by personally experiencing assorted assaults on their values and sense of justice. Politics is not a game to them -- they know who they are, what they're fighting against and, more importantly, what they're fighting for.

Knowledgeable and trusted local groups have been key to the recent election victories by bona fide progressives. These groups build relationships through work in their communities, know whom to speak with and can tackle the intensive work of going door to door. Several national organizations understand the power of a local focus and have invested in identifying amazing grassroots partners -- their 2017 results speak to the potential of this emerging network. Groups like Our Revolution, Working Families Party, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of America, People's Action, Progressive Democrats of America, Democracy for America and the Movement Voter Project are just some of the organizations doing important work. As the Movement Voter Project put in its recent report, "Failure is not an option. Not for our children. Not for our grandchildren."

When I was a boy, I loved spending time with my Uncle Ernest and Aunt Eula on their small northeast Texas farm. They pulled a frugal living from their 50 acres, raising a little bit of everything. Doing a lot with a little to make ends meet, Ernest and Eula operated on principle of frugality expressed in an old country rhyme:Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.

This meant that when their tractor broke down, they fixed it themselves. Likewise, if their old Zenith console radio went on the fritz, they didn't just order a new one, they brought out their tool kit and fixed it.

While the media and political powers seem blissfully ignorant of the "lifestyles" of America's commoners, most families are struggling financially and are making do or doing without. For this poor- to middle-class majority, frugality is not some old-world virtue, but a household necessity and the fix-it ethic is central to their lives. Add to them the millions of do-it-yourselfers who like to tinker or refuse to be a part of the corporate system's throwaway economy.

Today, just about every manufactured product containing software, from an electric toothbrush to an SUV, has no-repair clauses and/or digital locks. It's now standard industry practice for manufacturers to insert a spurious claim into their sales agreements that the company retains legal possession of key components of the products they sold to us, and only it can make repairs. To see how insidious this is, let's go back to the farm with Ernest and Eula.

My aunt and uncle would have been thunderstruck that a tractor company like Deere & Company, the world's largest, can now embed a ban on do-it-yourself repairs in the fine-print legalese gobbledygook of its sales contracts. Manufacturers call these devious clauses "End User License Agreements"—EULA!

Although buyers technically "own" the Deere tractor, the EULAs define the software that runs them as its "intellectual property" and asserts "proprietary rights" to certain parts. Therefore, if "unqualified individuals" (aka, farmers) tinker with their purchases, they can be held in violation of federal copyright laws.

Hog stuff! Which syllable in the word "own" don't they understand? If you bought it, it's yours. Period. Congress has passed no laws barring buyers from opening up, ripping out, adding in, fixing, rewiring, upgrading or tying bells onto stuff they've bought. Deere's claim to have a controlling power over people who own its products is a ridiculous perversion of language, logic and law.

Far worse, though, are the multiple harms done to farmers and others who have been led to believe that Deere's repair-prevention clause is the law:

First, just hauling your multi-ton tractor to one of the few dealerships or authorized repair shops can cost beaucoup bucks and invaluable time.
Second, while Deere will sometimes dispatch a technician for an on-site fix, the key question is: When? A few days' delay, especially during planting and harvesting, can crash a farmer's bottom line.
Third, when Deere's "do-not-touch" proprietary software goes haywire, leaving a farmer in the lurch with a broken-down tractor, it's not Deere's fault. Ever. The corporation's lawyers added language to its sales agreement declaring that farmers cannot sue the manufacturer for "crop loss, lost profits, loss of good will, [or] loss of the use of equipment."
Fourth, Deere's licensing scheme is an artificial, corporate-imposed, private "law" that will squeeze independent shops out of business and allow Deere to dominate the U.S. tractor-repair market, siphoning money and skilled jobs out of rural communities and ultimately leaving farmers at the mercy of a monopolist.

Deere's claim of a proprietary right to control the repair of your tractor is no more grounded in law than the snake oil flimflammers of yesteryear were grounded in science. Yes, Deere owns the copyrights, patents and trade secrets involved in creating the software, but you're not tampering with, pirating, altering or trying to sell any of those intellectual properties; you're just repairing your tractor, and it's none of the manufacturer's business. It's your absolute right to do so.

Populist author and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes The Hightower Lowdown, a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.

Bush’s Hit Man

Karl Rove wins . . .by any means necessary

by Louis Dubose Published on Friday, March 16, 2001, at

In early December 1999, George W. Bush’s chief political strategist, Karl Rove, and Dallas Morning News reporter Wayne Slater squared off in the Manchester, New Hampshire, airport. Rove was angry over a story Slater had written suggesting that it was plausible that Rove was behind the whisper campaign that warned that Senator John McCain–then soaring in the GOP presidential primary polls–might any day unravel, because he had been under so much pressure when he was tortured as a POW in Vietnam.

In a 700-word article that Slater said wasn’t the most significant thing he’d written about Rove, he referred to questionable campaign tactics attributed to Rove: teaching College Republicans dirty tricks; spreading a rumor that former Governor Ann Richards was too tolerant of gays and lesbians; circulating a mock newspaper that featured a story about a former Democratic governor’s drinking and driving when he was a college student; spreading stories about Jim Hightower’s alleged role in a contribution kickback scheme; and alerting the press to the fact that Lena Guerrero, a rising star in the Texas Democratic Party, had lied about graduating from college. Rove was explicitly linked by testimony and press reports to all but the gay and lesbian story; the college incident had been so widely reported for 15 years that it was essentially part of the common domain. Slater also reported that primary candidates Steve Forbes and Gary Bauer blamed the Bush camp for the smear campaign.

“He said I had harmed his reputation,” Slater recalls. Says another reporter who was traveling with Bush, “It was pretty heated. They were nose to nose. Rove was furious and had his finger in Slater’s chest.” Adds the same reporter, “What was interesting then is that everyone on the campaign charter concluded that Rove was responsible for rumors about McCain.”

That Karl Rove, who according to the White House press office is not giving interviews, hasn’t always abided by the Marquess of Queensbury rules of political engagement is not exactly breaking news. As long ago as 1989, when Rove collaborated with an FBI agent investigating Hightower, the then-Texas agriculture commissioner complained about Rove’s “Nixonian dirty tricks.”

That was at a time when Rove was a big player only in Texas. Since then, he has become George W. Bush’s closest adviser. He directed Bush’s presidential campaign and now works in an office just down the hall from the most powerful official in the world. Some wonder to what extent Rove will use the power of the federal government against those who would cross the President. Rove’s past suggests such worries are not unfounded. “This guy is worse than Haldeman and Ehrlichman,” a source who worked in Hightower’s office 12 years ago said in a recent interview, referring to Nixon’s advisers at the time of the Watergate break-in. “He’ll have an enemies list.” The interview ended with a request common among sources speaking about Rove, even those no longer involved in politics: “I’d prefer you didn’t quote me on this.”

Rove operates from deeply held conservative beliefs, shaped when he was a child growing up in Utah. His sister told Miriam Rozen of the Dallas Observer that as a child Rove had a Wake Up America poster hanging above his bed. Rove has said that while going to college, he was never inclined to identify with the antiwar movement and supported the troops because “it was hard to sympathize with all those Commies.” The “die-hard Nixonite” remains deeply resentful of the legacy of the counterculture of the sixties. Visitors to his Austin office would often leave with a copy of The Dream and the Nightmare by Myron Magnet, a Manhattan Institute fellow who argues that the political and cultural left corrupted the nation’s poor and deprived them of the work ethic they now need to lift themselves out of poverty.Rove is an eclectic and voracious reader and, although he never completed college, a self-taught historian. He is absolutely dedicated to George W. Bush, whom he describes as “the kind of candidate and officeholder political hacks like me wait for a lifetime to be associated with.”

Rove arrived in Houston in 1977 to work for a George Herbert Walker Bush PAC run by James Baker 3d. Rove subsequently moved from Houston to Austin, and in the 10 years it took George W. Bush to lose $2 million of other people’s money in the oilfields of West Texas, he became the Republican Party’s premier political consultant. At the time of Rove’s arrival, U. S. Senator John Tower was the only Republican holding statewide office. When Rove left earlier this year to serve as a senior adviser to President Bush, all 29 statewide elected offices were held by Republicans, and both U. S. Senate seats were occupied by Rove clients: Phil Gramm and Kay Bailey Hutchison. Almost half of GOP officeholders–including the governor, the attorney general, the chief justice, and several justices on the Texas Supreme Court–were also clients. Rove and the consulting firm he owned until joining the Bush campaign have represented more than 75 candidates in 24 states.

There have always been nagging questions about the tactics Rove has used to establish market domination. So when a tape of Bush’s practice debate sessions was mailed to Congressman Tom Downey, Al Gore’s opponent in practice debates, the speculation among the press corps in Austin was that Rove had arranged it. (A post office surveillance camera captured an image of an employee of Bush media consultant Mark McKinnon mailing a package that might have been the tape; a federal grand jury in Austin is still looking into the incident.) Some speculated that the move was intended to eliminate Downey from his role as debate coach (which it did); others that it would provide an excuse to cancel the debates (which, in hindsight, would have been helpful to Gore).

Austin political consultant Bill Miller has worked with and against Rove. Recently they worked together opposing a living wage campaign in Houston. “He was the right guy at the right time,” Miller says. “He was here in the late seventies with Bill Clements. He was the guy who began collecting the names of the people who gave money.” But Miller sees Rove as more than a guy who started work when Texas elected Clements as its first Republican governor of the twentieth century. “Karl has a good product. He’s good about message. He’s edgy, and you have got to have edge in political campaigns.” Miller also says that Rove is one of the most dependable political consultants to have ever worked in the state. “You can take what he says to the bank. He tells you what he’s going to do and when it will happen.” But what is most important, according to Miller, is that Rove wins. “People in the business of running campaigns often forget that the business is about winning, not about the number of clients you have. Karl always understood that.”

Rove, after all, works in the tradition of the late Lee Atwater, the Republican attack-dog/consultant who said of Michael Dukakis that he would “strip the bark off the little bastard” and “make Willie Horton his running mate,” a reference to the former Massachusetts governor’s ineffective answer to a question about a convicted murderer and rapist during the 1988 presidential debate.

Rove’s first foray into politics involved gaining entry to the office of Alan Dixon–a candidate for state treasurer in Illinois in 1970–stealing some campaign stationery and printing and distributing a fake invitation to Dixon’s campaign headquarters, promising “free beer, free food, girls, and a good time.” “I was nineteen and I got involved in a political prank,” Rove told the Dallas Morning News in 1999. A year later, Atwater ran Rove’s campaign for the presidency of the national College Republicans, and working together they defeated Terry Dolan, the Republican operative who later founded the National Conservative Political Action Committee that helped elect Ronald Reagan.

When, in the wake of the Watergate break-in, Rove was accused of teaching dirty tricks to college Republicans, he attributed the accusations to rumors started by Dolan. After the FBI interviewed Rove, the Republican National Committee–then chaired by Bush the Elder–looked into the charges, decided they were baseless, and offered Rove work.Rove later joined Bush and Baker to work on the PAC that Bush set up to position himself for the 1980 presidential campaign, which he lost to Ronald Reagan.

Rove soldiered on in obscurity until 1986, when he was working on the second campaign of Bill Clements, a Republican trying to recapture the governor’s office after losing it to Democrat Mark White. Rove made news by going public with a complaint that an electronic bugging device had been found in his office–shortly before a scheduled televised debate between the two candidates. “We never took it seriously, because we knew nobody in our shop had anything to do with it,” says Dwayne Hollman, who worked for White at the time. Hollman said it was assumed that it was a publicity stunt. “It was investigated by the FBI,” Hollman said, “and nothing ever came of it.”

Yet some wonder what “came of” Rove’s meeting with FBI agent Greg Rampton, who conducted that investigation. Local authorities who looked into the bugging seem to agree with Hollman’s assessment. “We were the first on the scene and concluded that Rove had hired a company to debug his office, and that the same company had planted the bug,” says a source involved in the Travis County DA office’s investigation. But the media reported that Rampton had determined there was nothing to pursue.

Two years later, Rampton began an investigation that involved his setting up shop in the offices ofGarry Mauro, the state land commissioner and later the loser in the 1998 gubernatorial race won by George W. Bush. Mauro said Rampton informed him that a former Land Commission employee was involved in an appraisals scheme that involved the commission. “I told my general counsel to tell [Rampton] to come on in,” Mauro said. Rampton accepted the invitation. “On the day of the Democratic state convention, I got a subpoena for every document you could possibly imagine,” Mauro said.

Mauro says he was warned by Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock–who, Mauro said, insisted on speaking to him outside their office buildings–that three Democrats, including Mauro, Hightower, and himself, were being targeted. As Mauro puts it, “Greg Rampton lived in my office. He roamed the halls. He had us put in a computer room, he picked out files of people who had given money and tried to establish by regression analysis… that anytime somebody gives you a contribution, there is a quid pro quo. Once they showed up with twelve agents and brought their own copier.” In the end they found nothing, according to Mauro. “But,” he adds, “they made it hard to run a campaign.” (Attempts to contact Rampton through the FBI office in Denver, from which he recently retired, were not successful.)

If Rampton struck out in Mauro’s office, he connected in Hightower’s, after slowing down only to subpoena Bullock’s campaign finance filings. In the summer of 1989, pending indictments against two aides to Hightower–who used his office to attack what he called “the bullies, bankers, bastards and tort reformers” who run the state–were announced in Washington. But it wasn’t Rampton or any other Justice Department official who announced them. It was Karl Rove, the political consultant working for Hightower’s Republican opponent, Rick Perry.

Hightower refuses to discuss the incident. Rove later admitted under oath that he had met with Rampton during the summer of 1989 “regarding a probe of political corruption in the office of Texas agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower.” And in June of 1990, Perry sent out a fundraising letter claiming that Hightower’s office was rife with corruption and was under investigation by the FBI, though there were no indictments until after the 1991 general election, in which Hightower lost his re-election bid.

Rove has repeatedly denied involvement in the FBI investigations of top Democrats in the 1980s and did not respond to questions submitted to him regarding this story. Miller doesn’t believe that Rove was directly involved with the FBI, describing the suggestion as “conspiracy theory that makes good political fodder, but is often political bullshit.” When questioned under oath before a Texas Senate committee in 1991, Rove was evasive about his relationship with Rampton and engaged in semantic hairsplitting worthy of Bill Clinton. “How long have you known an FBI agent by the name of Greg [Rampton]?” a Democratic senator asked Rove. The answer should have been fairly straightforward, as Rampton had cleared Rove of the bugging incident five years earlier and had met with him a number of times subsequently, which Rove had disclosed in a federal questionnaire in 1989. Yet Rove was, to say the least, evasive: “Senator, it depends. Would you define ‘know’ for me?”

And Rove has managed to eliminate at least one promising Democratic candidate without the help of the FBI or any other federal agency. Shortly after former Governor Ann Richards appointed Lena Guerrero to a vacant seat on theRailroad Commission, someone serving on a University of Texas committee selecting distinguished alumni learned that Guerrero had never graduated, contrary to her claims during her campaigns for a House seat and later for the Commission. Rove held on to the information until the time was right, then turned it over to the Dallas Morning News; confronted with the question, Guerrero unraveled. Rove’s biggest political coup, until last November’s election, was organizing the campaign by which Bush beat Ann Richards.

Rove became acquainted with George W. Bush while working for his father and Baker in Houston but didn’t work for the younger Bush until he decided to run for governor in 1994. The campaign was all Rove: a four-point message, rumors about the opponent (Ann Richards) circulated by surrogates and little direct exposure to the press.

To those following the Bush campaigns that Rove ran, it was evident that he was more than just a political consultant to Bush. Writing in the Boston Globe magazine, David Shribman posed the questions that many in the press corps dared not ask during the presidential campaign: “Is there a place where George W. Bush ends and Karl Rove begins? Are you the wizard behind the curtain of George W.? Is W. too dependent upon you? And, worst of all: Are you George W. Bush’s brain?”

Rove has certainly done much of Bush’s thinking for him. Asked by a reporter for the National Review what thinkers had shaped Bush’s political philosophy, Rove cited Magnet’s The Dream and the Nightmare, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Demoralization of Society, James Q. Wilson’s On Character and several other books–none of which Bush would have been likely to see but for Rove. (Recall Bush’s response in the debate about which political philosopher had most shaped his thinking: It was not Magnet, Himmelfarb, or Wilson, but Jesus Christ.)

When working as a political operative and not a mentor, Rove has been bipartisan, eliminating Republicans who represented a threat to his boss’s career with the same zeal with which he attacked Democrats. “He’s enormously effective,” says Dallas lawyer and Bush critic Tom Pauken, noting that Rove’s political bible is Machiavelli’s The Prince. And it is Machiavelli–not the authors of the conservative and neocon canon–who has informed Rove’s treatment of Pauken. In 1994, as Bush was beginning his first race for governor, the machinery of the Republican Party of Texas was taken over by Reagan Republicans and fundamentalist Christians, and Pauken–who had worked in the Reagan Administration–was made party chairman. It was a faction that Rove correctly perceived would create problems for Bush, who had always understood that the Christian conservatives must be kept in line. Rove called big funders and diverted money from the state party to Bush political accounts

that he controlled. “He did everything he could to cut off the money to the party… throughout the time I was chair,” Pauken says. “Karl understands the importance of money in politics, and he made it more difficult for me to function.”

When Pauken filed in 1997 for the attorney general’s race Rove recruited John Cornyn to run against him in the Republican primary–and many believe that Rove encouraged Barry Williams to run in the same race, and then pushed him to go negative on Pauken late in the campaign.

Similarly, after two Christian-right candidates for the State Board of Education, Bob Offutt and Donna Ballard (Offutt was an incumbent), traveled to New Hampshire to endorse Steve Forbes in the Republican primary, they returned home to find their opponents’ campaigns suddenly flush with cash from big Republican givers associated with Rove. “You don’t cross Karl Rove and not expect repercussions,” a defeated Offutt told the Austin American-Statesman. A Republican political consultant was more colorful: “To put it in a nutshell, you don’t tug on Superman’s cape.”

In January, Superman moved into the White House office previously occupied by Hillary Clinton. And he’s only a phone call away from Attorney General John Ashcroft.

FormerObservereditor Louis Dubose is politics editor at theAustin Chronicleand co-author, with Molly Ivins, ofShrub: the Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush. An earlier version of this article was published inThe Nation.

Did Karl Rove Help Send an Innocent Man to Jail?

http://www.washingtonspectator.com/index.php/Archive/did-karl-rove-help-send-an-innocent-man-to-jail.html#.Ui46pjbVDmg

:{November 15, 2007

by Lou Dubose}:

THE HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE INVESTIGATION into the political prosecution and conviction of former Alabama governor Don Siegelman, briefly discussed in the November 1 issue, leads inevitably to former senior White House aide Karl Rove.

Although Rove has left the White House and is living in Texas, and would probably try to assert executive privilege were his White House records regarding the Siegelman case subpoenaed, he shouldn't be allowed to walk. The only party to testify under oath in the case described Republican campaign aides setting up Siegelman for prosecution in Alabama while Rove pushed the Justice Department in Washington to ensure that Siegelman's prosecution moved forward.

This wouldn't be the first time that Rove used contacts within the Justice Department to destroy the career of a political adversary. Siegelman's prosecution bears a striking familiarity to the FBI investigation of Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower in 1990, and the conviction of two of his aides.

Like Siegelman, Hightower was the "golden boy" of Democratic politics in his state. Until he decided to run for re-election, Hightower was his party's best hope to unseat U.S. senator Phil Gramm. He had cultivated a national following, national funders, and was an effective voice for the progressive wing of the national Democratic Party. In 1990, Hightower was an incumbent who couldn't be beat—until two federal agents with search warrants walked into his Austin office the same day he was kicking off his re-election campaign in a small rural town in the Panhandle. Hightower's Republican opponent was Rick Perry, currently the governor of Texas. Perry's campaign was directed by Karl Rove.

Indictments at the Texas Agriculture Department weren't announced by a Justice Department spokesperson or in a DOJ press release, but at a Washington, D.C., fundraiser by a political consultant. Karl Rove told reporters that Hightower and several aides "faced the possibility of indictment in June or July."

How could Rove have known? He knew because of his contacts with an FBI agent who began investigating statewide elected officials in Texas in the late 1980s, when all statewide offices were occupied by Democrats. FBI agent Greg Rampton moved from the office of one Democratic official to another, issuing subpoenas, downloading computer files, and photo-copying contributor lists. Rampton investigated the Democratic lieutenant-governor while Rove was working on the campaign of his Republican opponent, the Democratic land commissioner while Rove was working on the campaign ofhis opponent. The same was true of Democratic ag commissioner Jim Hightower; Rampton was investigating him while Rove was working for his opponent.

KARL UNDER OATH—It wasn't until Rove was questioned under oath that part of the truth regarding his relationship with Rampton emerged. In 1991 Rove was appointed to a state board. The appointment required state Senate confirmation. Democrats on the nomination committee took advantage of the opportunity.

"How long have you known an FBI agent by the name of Greg Rampton?" one senator asked during the testimony.

"Senator, it depends. Would you define know for me?

When pressed, Rove said: "Ah, I know, I would not recognize Greg if he walked in the door. We have talked on the phone var— a number of times. Ah, and he has visited my office a number of times. But we do not have a social or personal relationship whatsoever."

Not recognize someone he met a number of times? Caught off guard, Rove stuck his foot in a rather obvious perjury trap and then retreated to the truth. He had been more specific in a written response regarding a different federal appointment. "This summer [1990] I met with agent Greg Rampton of the Austin FBI office at his request regarding a probe of the political corruption in the office of Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower," he said. Rove wasn't required to explain why an FBI agent was meeting with the political consultant directing the campaign of Hightower's opponent.

In their book Bush's Brain, Austin journalists James Moore and Wayne Slater catch something that most of us following Rove's Texas Senate testimony missed. Rove said he became involved in the campaign of Rick Perry in November of 1989. "At that point," Rove told the Texas Senate committee, "there was already an FBI investigation ongoing of the Texas Department of Agriculture, prompted by stories, which had appeared in August and September, I believe, in the Dallas Morning News."

The problem with this account is that in November 1989 no subpoenas had been issued. No one at the Ag Department was aware of an investigation. Yet Rove was. In the end, two of Hightower's aides—Pete McCrae and Mike Moeller—were sentenced to prison for illegal fundraising for Jim Hightower. Hightower escaped indictment. But he was damaged goods and lost to Rick Perry by 50,000 votes.

REPEAT PERFORMANCE—Returning to this would amount to beating a dead horse or reworking biographical information—if the similarities between the prosecution of Don Siegelman and Hightower aides McCrae and Moeller were not so evident. So evident, in fact, that an attorney who worked at the Texas Ag Department in the late eighties told me in casual conversation last week that he wanted to get McRae and Moeller in front of the House Judiciary Committee—to help committee members understand "precisely how Don Siegelman was set up."

Rove was clearly inside the 1989 investigation of Jim Hightower. And it's Rove whom Alabama attorney Jill Simpson describes as driving Siegelman's prosecution from inside the Justice Department. When she testified in September before the House Judiciary Committee, Simpson talked about a November 18, 2002, conference call in which, she alleges, the prosecution of Siegelman was discussed with gubernatorial candidate Bob Riley's son Rob.

Q. Okay. And did Rob ask something about if they were sure that Bill Canary's girls could take care of Don Siegelman?

A. Yes, they did.

Q. Can you describe that part of the conversation?

A. Well, what he said—Bill Canary told him not to worry. He had already got it taken care of with Karl. And that Karl had spoken to the Justice Department, and the Justice Department was already pursuing Don Siegelman.

Q. And did you know who he meant by Karl?

A. I did.

Q. Who did you think he meant?

A. Karl Rove.

Q. Did he ever say Karl Rove?

A. No. But I knew from conversations that I had had with Rob that Bill Canary was very connected to Karl Rove. Additionally, there was some talk—and that's not in my affidavit—about Karl had—about Washington; that Karl had it taken care of in Washington. . . . So I understood that to be—and the only Karl I knew involved in Rob's conversation was Karl Rove.

CANARY SINGS—The 2005 investigation, prosecution, and conviction of Don Siegelman while he was preparing to challenge the Republican who defeated him by 3,000 votes in 2002 might be the focus of a parlor game called "Six Degrees of Separation From Karl Rove."

Bill Canary is a transplanted New Yorker and the most prominent Republican political consultant in Alabama. He has worked with Rove for more than ten years, and they are friends. He directed the gubernatorial campaign of Bob Riley, who defeated Siegelman by the narrowest margin in the history of the state's gubernatorial elections.

Bill Canary's "girls," according to Simpson, were Leura Canary and Alice Martin, two U.S. Attorneys appointed George W. Bush.

The initial investigation of Siegelman was undertaken by Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor, whose campaign for statewide office was directed by Rove. In April 2003 George W. Bush used a recess appointment to put Pryor on the federal bench, circumventing Senate Democrats who objected to Pryor's extremist views on abortion and homosexuality. Pryor was ultimately confirmed by the Senate. Rove worked to keep Pryor's nomination alive.

Alice Martin undertook one failed prosecution of Siegelman. Leura Canary was directing the investigation that ultimately put Siegelman in jail, when Siegelman's attorneys forced her to recuse herself because of her marriage to Bill Canary. Leura Canary turned the case over to her subordinate Louis Franklin.

Noel Hillman worked the Siegelman prosecution in the Justice Department's Office of Public Integrity unit, where he was acting director. When the prosecution was wrapped up, Hillman was appointed to the federal bench in New Jersey. Rove was involved in the screening of Bush's judicial appointments, and he would have been intimately involved in one as controversial as Hillman's. Hillman was moved out of Justice and onto the federal bench while he was directing the investigation of disgraced lobbyistJack Abramoff, which pulled him off a case that involved corruption at the highest level of the Republican Party. Rove was in contact with Hillman while he was acting chief of the DOJ's Public Integrity unit in Washington—and while he was pursuing an appointment to the federal bench.

The ethical conflict—a political appointee at DOJ working on the prosecution of a former elected official while waiting in line for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench—was so evident it required no elaboration during an October 23 House Judiciary subcommittee hearing. At the hearing, Alabama Democrat Artur Davis questioned former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones, who as a private attorney was involved in Siegelman's defense:

REP. DAVIS: Does the name Noel Hillman register to you?

MR. JONES: Yes. He was head of the Public Integrity section at the time.

REP. DAVIS: Did Mr. Hillman at some point move from Public Integrity to become United States district judge?

MR. JONES: He did.

REP. DAVIS: And was it shortly after the period of time in which he would have been

at the Office of Public Integrity [that he was] to go from Public Integrity to the U.S. Justice—

MR. JONES: That's correct.

REP. DAVIS: —district judgeship?

Noel Hillman might be the most Solomonic jurist ever to sit as a federal district judge in New Jersey. But while coordinating the prosecution of Don Siegelman, he was also a job applicant whose performance was evaluated by Karl Rove.

Don Siegelman's federal prosecutors were so closely associated with Karl Rove that there was enough conflict of interest to justify a change of venue to the Hague. Yet when Siegelman's defense attorneys raised the "conflict" issue, they were gaveled down. The judge refused to hear arguments that the prosecution was political. The only deference to partisan and ethical conflict was Leura Canary's recusal—and the assignment of the case to a junior attorney she supervised.

With odds like that, only an unbiased federal judge would have kept Siegelman out of a federal penitentiary. Mark Fuller was not that judge. Even if Fuller never promised to "hang" Don Siegelman, as Simpson says she was told by Governor Riley's son Rob, the judge represented something less than blind justice.

COMPROMISING POSITIONS—As I reported in the November 1 issue, Fuller earns millions in contracts with the Navy and Air Force. While he presided over Don Siegelman's trial, Fuller was collecting as much as $1 million a year from stock holdings derived from federal contracts—earnings far greater than his salary as an Article III judge. According to Simpson, Rob Riley told her that Fuller was both a federal judge and a federal contractor—an arrangement that might lead the judge to cultivate the favor of an administration whose executive departments issued contracts and wrote checks that provided his stock dividends. For Mark Fuller, the federal government wasn't just his employer; it was his profit center.

And there is more.

In her testimony, Simpson says she was told that Mark Fuller hated Siegelman. According to Simpson, Fuller believed that Siegelman had him audited while Fuller was a district attorney and Siegelman was governor. "[Rob Riley] also told me about a backlogging case, which is what you call the salary spike," Simpson said. "He called it the 'backlogging.' . . . I'd never heard the term 'backlogging.'"

The correct term is "backloading"—inflating an employee's salary as he approaches retirement. Whether Governor Siegelman initiated the investigation or not, Fuller was guilty. According to theMontgomeryAdvertiser, investigators from Alabama's State Employee Retirement System discovered that as district attorney, Fuller had increased the salary of one of his investigators from $80,307 to $152,014. The forty-nine year-old county investigator who received the generous raise was preparing to retire. Beyond the pay increase, the $152,014 salary scale would have provided the inspector with an additional $1,000 a month for the rest of his life. Or as employment system actuaries calculated it, a lifetime benefit increase of $330,000. The investigation—and reduction—of the inspector's salary embarrassed Fuller.

And while it's not unusual for federal judges to have a political life before life on the bench, Mark Fuller had served on the Alabama Republican Party's Executive Committee before Bush appointed him.

Dickens's Mr. Bumble observed that "the law is an ass." And it often is. So perhaps Inmate 24775-007 at the Federal Corrections Institute at Oakdale, Louisiana, is guilty of bribery, conspiracy and mail fraud—even if a motive isn't evident. HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy contributed $500,000 to a fund Governor Siegelman created to pay for a campaign to establish a state lottery to fund college tuition for all Alabama high school graduates. Then Siegelman appointed Scrushy to a vice-chair position on the hospital Certificate Need Board, to which Scrushy had already been appointed by three other governors. (Scrushy was also convicted and is in prison in Texas.)

Jill Simpson was a volunteer on Bob Riley's campaign and as a lawyer had worked with his son Rob. What she saw inside the campaign engaged her gag reflex, and she came forward to testify. She has been the target of protracted attacks in the Alabama media. Much of what she said under oath has been denounced as fabrication. Virginia Congressman Randy Forbes wants her investigated by the Justice Department. The parties she claims participated in the conference call say it never occurred—although in sworn affidavits they will only say they don't recall the phone call. (Simpson's phone bills support her account down to the minute.)

The prosecution of Don Siegelman is the flip side of the U.S. Attorney scandal that sent Alberto Gonzales looking for honest work and a legal-defense fund in Texas. Gonzales, famously, recalls nothing. Gonzales aide Monica Goodling admitted she "went over the line" in examining the political background of applicants for U.S. Attorney positions. Gonzales aide Kyle Sampson wrote that certain U.S. Attorneys were fired because they were not "loyal Bushies." The Siegelman scandal involves cases brought by the loyal Bushies who remain in office.

Siegelman's case is currently on appeal. And the House Judiciary Committee is investigating—despite protestations of committee Republicans who complain that the investigation represents the politicizing of the judicial process.