You might be alarmed to learn that a little-known group in America is being treated inhumanely, denied even the most basic human rights.

I refer to our society’s callous treatment of AI bots.

Who? AI bots are not an ethnic group, but the rapidly-evolving species of advanced “artificial intelligence beings,” spawned in recent years by the high-tech demi-gods of Silicon Valley. Unbeknownst to most of us natural-born humans, profiteering corporations are already deploying millions of these “thinking machines” across our country, taking an ever-widening array of jobs that require a measure of cognitive, human-level abilities – from architects to therapists, lawyers to journalists.

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However, rather than focusing on the deep ethical and pragmatic questions that this techno-corporate displacement poses for real-life people, the developers of AI’s Brave New World are trying to divert social concern to the bots. A recent headline urgently asks, “Should AI Systems Have Rights?” And a leading maker of those systems is proclaiming that society must be concerned about the “mental welfare” of bots. Meanwhile, corporate owners are urging that their machine creatures be given a moral status to assure that they are “ethically treated.”

Excuse me, but who are these greedmeisters to set ethical standards? The billionaires of tech have enriched themselves, not by any genius, but by ruthlessly exploiting workers, carelessly polluting our environment, arrogantly violating our laws, stealing from their competitors and consumers, and bribing government officials. They are sleaze.

Besides, corporate bots need to go the back of the line! Before we give rights to machines, let’s secure the rights that moneyed elites have denied to women, the poor, nature… and democracy itself.

To learn more about AI, ethics, privacy and more, and to support sane advocacy around technology in general, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation at eff.org.

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I am a product of George Washington University Law School, so I feel I have an insider’s right to comment on the super-elite law firms that’ve suddenly been kowtowing to Trump.

Well… actually, I only lasted a week-and-a-half in law school. Still, you don’t need to be a legal scholar to see that these butt-kissing, billion-dollar firms are – to use a judicial term – scuzz.

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It’s certainly true that Trump is a vindictive, petty president who routinely turns his office into a weapon of personal political revenge. And he especially despises lawyers who have defied his many blatantly-illegal power grabs, so he’s been deploying the crushing force of big government to punish such prominent Democratic firms as Paul Weiss. Trump stripped security clearances from Weiss lawyers, barred them from entering federal buildings, and threatened to cancel their clients’ government contracts.

No one said battling a despot would be easy. But, as Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently put it, “If you’re not used to fighting and losing battles, then don’t become a lawyer.”

Rather than fight, the Weiss firm pathetically tucked tail and ran whimpering to Trump, begging forgiveness for challenging his unconstitutional acts. They even made a $40 million payoff to get in Lord Donald’s good graces!

Senior partners in the Weiss firm, each of whom are paid some $20 million a year, are not only gutless, but greedy as well. They sold their integrity to a mobster like Trump, so he would “let them” keep drawing that fat check. It shows that the opposite of courage is not merely cowardice, but conformity.

If lawyers will so meekly abandon their own democratic rights, why would any of us pay them to stand up for ours?

To find and support lawyers who actually support The People, check out the National Lawyers Guild at nlg.org.

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By popular demand (and thanks to your steady support for our weekly online commentaries) the Hightower Lowdown team is offering this new feature on Substack: Long-form articles, like those that once comprised the print version of the Lowdown newsletter.

When we made the hard decision to move to an all-digital publication, we weren’t sure what kind of capacity and resources we’d have, and we also weren’t sure what kind of appetite you subscribers would have for articles requiring more time to read online.

But many of you have mentioned how much you’ve missed those articles that went went into depth on big issues. And we had to admit we also missed having more space to expound on who’s-doing-what-to-whom-and-why. (If you’re unfamiliar with the print version of the Lowdown, aka, America’s feistiest little newsletter, the archives of 20+ years of our work are still available online!)

Thanks to your generous ongoing support and belief in the importance our work, we’re now slowly getting to a point of enough financial stability that we can focus on producing more that we hope is useful to you. Thank you for coming along with us for the ride on this long, often-bumpy road of progressive populism.

We’re going to be playing with the format of the new, long-form pieces as well. A chunk of the new issues will be text-based articles, and some will be videos and interviews with strategists, organizers and activists working on the front lines. The Lowdown’s new long-form issues will be available to paid subscribers, while our twice-per-week short commentaries will remain free and open to all.

So, now we want to hear from you: What topics would you be interested in having us cover in the longer format? Just leave your ideas in the comments—we’re eager to dive in and work with you for a brighter future for all.

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In this dark age of Trumpian rule, is there any glimmer of hope?

Yes – lo and behold: Texas!

I’ll bet you were not expecting that answer. Well, for sure, the Republican clique of arrogant billionaires and Christian supremacists who thought they owned Texas politics didn’t expect the comeuppance voters delivered to them in this month’s local elections.

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In city and school board contests across the state, Texans bluntly said to right-wing operatives and officials: We’re sick of you – your constant attempts to divide and dictate, ban and bully, privatize and profiteer at the expense of the common good.

For example, in the flashing-red suburbs of Fort Worth, where GOP front groups have spent millions in dark-money to take over school boards, Democratic challengers won 11 of 11 races! In Mansfield, the county’s third largest city, all five right-wing extremists running for mayor and school board lost. “Mansfield has gone to Hell,” screeched one of the Christian Nationalist activists!

No, it’s being yanked back to its senses, rejecting hyper-partisan nutballism and church dictatorship in favor of, you know, educating children!

Also, voters in Katy, Fort Bend, Plano, Richardson, and other big suburbs – long written off as solid red bastions – produced sweeping progressive victories.

This grassroots turnaround is no accident. It’s largely the product of a young generation of progressive activists revitalizing the tried-and-true practice of “little-d” democratic organizing – which means showing up in-person, day-in and day-out to connect with workaday people, focusing on their real problems.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Of course, this doesn’t mean Texas is suddenly blue – but it’s on the right path, and that offers hope in other red and purple areas. Remember: The first rule of politics is to show up.

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Well, habemus papam—welcome, Pope Leo! Bless him… and us.

I hope no one thinks me blasphemous, but I go to a church nearly every Saturday that is not denominational, nor is it held in any sort of ornate cathedral, temple or mosque. It’s a plain wooden, open-air shed with a metal roof and a loose brick floor—but it’s filled with goodness, joy and a diversity of devotees who share in the bounty of nature. It’s the Boggy Creek Farmstand, one of more than a dozen farmers’ markets flourishing in my hometown of Austin, Texas.

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Indeed, thousands of these secular-but-soulful gathering places that nurture body and spirit have cropped up all across America. From big city neighborhoods, to rural towns, they provide a genuine grassroots alternative to factory food and monopoly megamarts.

The spread of this good food movement has been neither “miraculous” nor the product of some corporate conclave. Rather, it’s the organic result of hundreds of local coalitions—small farmers, consumer advocates, environmentalists, community officials, and others dedicated to real, lasting progress of, by and for workaday people.

When organizing a Texas network of these cooperative ventures in my years as state agriculture commissioner, we followed a path blazed by (shhhh, don’t tell anyone) New York City. There, a pragmatic visionary named Barry Benepe and his can-do cohort were showing that small farmers could bypass the corporate system and profit by selling directly to consumers in the city.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Our friend Barry passed away last month at 96, but what a legacy—45 Greenmarkets in New York City alone, and a national farm-to-table movement! To help extend its reach into your town, go to farmersmarketcoalition.org.

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Like locusts swarming a wheat field, corporate lobbyists are all over our nation’s capital this spring, trying to get special favors, handouts, and insider deals from the White House huckster-in-chief.

It’s a corrupt-money sleazefest with lobbyists blatantly offering high-dollar political donations in exchange for presidential and congressional favoritism. Hundreds of these corporate requests are so selfish and unfair that it’s been hard to single out any one as exceptionally sleazy. Until now.

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Meet the “Coalition of Recyclers of Residual Organics.” Well, recycle and coalition sound sorta positive, right? But what are “residual organics?” Uh… poop. Specifically, sewage sludge, including human waste. Piped from our homes, it goes through sewer systems to utility plants, which treat it and filter out the water, leaving a thick sludge of “biosolids.”

And what does “recycling” mean? Corporate giants like Synagro (which is owned by Wall Street financier Goldman Sachs) buy it and simply rebrand the stuff as “fertilizer.” They reap huge profits selling the sludge to unsuspecting farmers and ranchers, not mentioning that it can contain deadly levels of “forever chemicals.” Millions of acres across America have already been contaminated – along with water sources, livestock, and families.

So now, lobbyists for sludge peddlers are demanding that Trump’s government intervene. Not to help victimized families, but literally to take away the legal right of those families to sue the corporate profiteers that poisoned them.

Unsurprisingly, Republican lawmakers are siding with the poisoners. Meanwhile, Synagro continues to sell sludge as fertilizer, and Trump officials are even pushing EPA to stop designating “forever chemicals” as hazardous.

Has everyone gone crazy!? No. To find sanity in this mess, go to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility: peer.org

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Donnie Trump – what a joker, huh?

Remember his promise to end Russia’s war against Ukraine on Day One of his presidency? No joke, he bragged: “It’ll be done within 24 hours. You watch.”

Well, here we are at Day One Hundred, with the war still raging. So Trump either lied… or failed. But The Donald had a Joker up his sleeve – he now claims that, “when I said [Day One] it was in jest.”

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Horsefeathers. First it was a core campaign promise, which he talked about at length in at least 53 of his widely publicized events (including two nationally-televised) debates. Second, he repeatedly assured his MAGA devotees that he was not joking, but literally would end Putin’s war in a day.

He became the joke, because he knows nothing about war and has surrounded himself with Fox News blowhards who know even less. I don’t mean that as an idle put-down, but as a screaming civil-defense warning of incoming danger. Unbeknownst to nearly all of us, Commander Trump and his menagerie of macho ne’er-do-wells are quietly-but-rapidly pulling America once again into the Big Muddy.

They’ve blundered into another “forever war,” dumping billions of our dollars into high-tech bombing raids against Houthi militia. Who? Houthis are tenacious guerilla fighters in the small impoverished nation of Yemen. Like the Viet Cong some 60 years ago, they are clever and resilient – and they’re confounding arrogant White House and Pentagon autocrats who keep thinking they can bomb their way to world domination.

As Pete Seeger put it in his Big Muddy song, “The big fool says to push on.” But we don’t have to obey. To push back, go to PeoplesAction.org.

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Top officials of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau erupted in cheers this month.

How odd. The cheers were for a federal court that had just ruled in favor of letting big banks gouge us with exorbitant feeds when we’re late making a credit card payment. Bizarrely, agency officials joined jubilant bank executives in declaring, “This is a win for consumers.”

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Huh? The court’s blatantly plutocratic ruling lets financial giants slap us credit card customers with punitive fees of $32 or more for every late payment. The court is legalizing their consumer robbery, allowing credit card lenders to pluck an extra $10 billion a year in excess fees from our pockets. Adding to their shame, the profiteering bankers will mainly squeeze this windfall from low-paid working families who’re living paycheck to paycheck, having to rely on credit to make ends meet.

So why in hell are the government’s consumer protectors cheering this? Because these officials are no longer “ours,” but corporate operatives been installed by Trump’s brigade of billionaires. The supreme goal of their autocratic government is to further empower the rich over the rest of us.

Indeed, displacing consumer protectors with agents who’ll protect corporations from consumers was an explicit goal of Project 2025. That extremist manifesto was co-authored by Russell Vought, a fanatical right-wing politico from the Christian Nationalist cult. What’s he doing now? Trump has put Vought in charge of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Thus, a national agency meant to help average consumers have a bit more of a fighting chance against financial greed has been perverted by Trump into just another tool helping moneyed elites rip off working families. How great does that make America?

Consumer Reports and the Consumer Federation of America are both working to save the CFPB; additionally, a lawsuit has been filed by Gupta Wessler, a high-stakes litigation firm in D.C., on behalf of the National Treasury Employees Union, National Consumer Law Center, NAACP, Virginia Poverty Law Center, Pastor Eva Steege, and the CFPB Employee Association.

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The federal budget is not only about money, but fundamentally about our country’s morality—our commitment to fairness, equality and unity.

Which brings me to, of all things, our nation’s Farm Bill. This sprawling piece of legislation, updated every five years, is intended to combine the interests of farmers with consumers, production with conservation, grassroots cultures with corporate systems… etc. It’s not easy. In fact, downright messy.

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But now, with plutocratic ideologues and culture warriors dominating their caucus, Republican lawmakers have not even been able to produce an agreement among themselves, so the comprehensive farm bill America needs is a year overdue and no longer being pursued by the party in charge. Instead, the GOP’s ag committee chairman, Rep. Glenn Thompson, is jerry-rigging a stripped-down sham of a bill limited to the two spending priorities of MAGA Republicans:

One: Hand out many billions more of our taxpayers’ dollars to subsidize agribusiness giants and rich speculators who own the biggest farms, mainly because they’ll then keep funding and voting for Republicans.

Two: Whack America’s poorest families. Thompson is banking on the minginess of extremist Republicans who oppose the Ag Department’s hunger programs. Those programs help 40 million poverty-stricken Americans (including 1 in 5 children) afford the groceries they need.

So, there we have the GOP’s farm bill ethics—cut the poor to give more to the rich in order to buy votes for more of the same. The word for this is “corrupt.” Also, “cruel.”

Indeed, it takes an exceptional level of political shamelessness to steal food from the hungry in order to fatten some of the richest people in our country. To fight their depravity, go to ruralorganizing.org.

The House GOP leadership has been making noises that they’re looking at the House Ag Committee’s meeting on May 8 for the Farm Bill’s reconciliation markup. You can help put pressure on the committee itself by contacting its members, and demanding that your own representatives support small family famers and the programs our most vulnerable communities depend on.

There’s also a great tool from The Democracy Labs showing where kids will go hungry and farmers will be bankrupted: check out the MAGA HUNGER MAP and use it to call your representative.

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Over the millennia, farmers everywhere have learned the wisdom of a commonsense practice in agriculture: Don’t Eat Your Seed Corn.

Raise the best crop you can—but be sure to store enough of the seed you produce this year to plant next year’s crop. Even with the razzle-dazzle computerization modern-day agriculture, seed savers are as essential as ever. Maybe more so, given climate change, mass pollution, species collapses, genetic loss, etc. Seeds are our future.

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Luckily, a local, national, and global movement arose decades ago to say: “Let’s not be stupid.” Noting that new diseases, pests, blights, etc. continually break out around the globe, wiping out entire varieties of essential food crops, pioneers of this movement set up a system of “gene banks” for future needs.

Established in the Ag Department in 1898, these banks collect, store and keep alive vast reserves of seeds containing the genetic diversity of our entire food supply. They are literally a human survivalist resource. For example, if a devastating fungus infects a variety of wheat, scientists can search 62,000 other wheat varieties in the gene bank to find seed with a natural resistance to that fungus.

With a shoestring budget and a small staff of scientists, this network of 22 regional gene banks is government at its best, doing invaluable public work, efficiently.

But then, stupid showed up. Elon Musk, Trump’s thuggish whacker of the common good, has stormed into the seed saver community with his cartoonish chainsaw roaring. He summarily fired the network’s top plant scientists, slashed its meager budget—and is playing God with our food future.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Just as rats should be kept out of America’s seed bins, so should Elon Musk.

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