Jim Hightower

New Life for Local Newspapers

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by Jim Hightower How about a little bit of good news for a change? Specifically, good news about news. The demise of local newspapers has been a very depressing story in the last few years, with several thousand of them gobbled up by Wall Street profiteers. Those money powers loot the publications’ assets, then callously shut down each community’s paper, or reduces them to empty news shells. So that’s that—local print journalism is passé, right? Wrong! High-spirited, community-minded subscribers in places like Glen Rose (Texas), Hamburg (Iowa), Portland (Maine), and International Falls (Minnesota) are humming an upbeat tune of regeneration that could be titled “Not …

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Joe Manchin’s Pipe Dream

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by Jim Hightower Rube Goldberg would marvel at Sen. Joe Manchin’s wacky, convoluted machinations to rig the system so fossil fuel polluters can run roughshod over nature, local people, and democracy. Goldberg was a master of satirical cartoons, drawing hilarious schematics of convoluted contraptions to do silly tasks. His “Self-Operating Napkin,” for example, involved a spoon, cracker, toucan, skyrocket, sickle, and a pendulum attached to a napkin—all operating sequentially to automatically wipe the chin of a soup eater. So here comes Joe with his own sequential machinations to (Zip! Ping! Sproing!) push his pet corporate boondoggle into law. Manchin’s Mountain Valley Pipeline would ram a …

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Let’s Create a Bank System That Serves People, Instead of Bankers

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Corporate ideologues never cease blathering that government programs should be run like a business. Really—what businesses would they choose? Pharmaceutical profiteers? Big Oil? Wall Street money manipulators? High tech billionaires? Airline price gougers? The good news is that the great majority of people aren’t buying this corporatist blather, instead valuing institutions that prioritize the Common Good. Thus, by a 2-to-1 margin, Americans have stunned smug right-wing privatizers by specifically declaring in a recent poll that our U.S. Postal Service should not be “run like a business.” Indeed, an overwhelming majority, including half of Republicans, say mail delivery should be run as a “public service,” even …

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The Plutocrats Cry, People Cheer

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“Outrageous,” screeched the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “It doesn’t feel fair,” whimpered a top corporate executive. The wailing by those who run corporate America is not for the plight of the workaday families who’ve seen their incomes stagnate and even plummet to zero during the past months of the coronavirus pandemic. Rather, this chorus of woe comes from powerful plutocratic interests that have been enjoying windfall profits. Why? Because, they cry, that meanie in the White House, Joe Biden, intends to jack up their corporate tax rate. But wait didn’t Trump and the GOP Congress slash the corporate share of our nation’s upkeep nearly in …

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Are CEOs Really “Worth” Millions of Dollars?

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These days, the haughty rich in our country have developed such an arrogant sense of self-entitlement that they’ve gone from being merely irritating to infuriating. Unsurprisingly, their plutocratic greed and rigging of the system has generated a political backlash, including a widely-popular push to tax the massive stashes of wealth the upper-upper class has amassed by stiffing the middle class and poor. Alarmed by this uprising, the rich have launched a major effort to defuse public anger—not by altering their own behavior, but by a semantical twist. Interestingly, since “The Rich” has become such a negative phrase, it is being dropped from the vocabularies of …

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Monopoly Is What’s For Dinner

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No longer just a parlor game, monopoly is what’s for dinner. Practically every commodity and every step in producing our families’ most essential consumer purchase is in the tight grip of four or fewer global conglomerates: Four chemical giants control more than two-thirds of the world market for commercial seeds. Tyson Foods and three other meatpackers control 60 percent of the U.S. poultry market, while just three global packers control 85 percent of the U.S. beef market and 71 percent of the pork market. Four multinational grain trading powers control 90 percent of all grain (corn, wheat, rice, &c.) marketed in the world. John Deere …

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