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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Donald Trump has never been able to comprehend the plain fact that when a person says no, that actually means “NO.” His view is that his every desire should be met with surrender—even if that requires applying force.

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This explains a lot about his crude approach to Greenland, demanding that the Danish territory simply succumb to him. Even though proud Greenlanders have repeatedly said, “Go away!” to Trump’s uninvited advances, their emphatic rejections have only heightened his sadistic lust for dominance. Indeed, rebuffed again this month, he turned downright sinister, declaring, “One way or another, we’re going to get it.”

Why push so fiercely for a frozen Arctic island that has a population smaller than Greenville, South Carolina? First, because Donald is an overprivileged child with an insatiable need to assert power over others. The pragmatic reason though, is money. Beneath that thick covering of ice, Greenland has a trove of oil, uranium, precious metals, etc., that Trump and his billionaire cohorts desperately want to plunder.

Initially, Trump & Co. tried macho American chauvinism to get their way: Leave dull old Denmark, they propositioned, and we’ll make you a sort of American sub-state. People snickered at that, so Trump tried his usual pay-off ploy—give in to us, he told the islanders, and “we will make you rich.” Rightly insulted, “We Are Not for Sale” protests erupted across the land, and “Trump” became a curse word in the island’s Danish, Inuit and English languages.

This is Jim Hightower saying… But “no” means “go” to him, so he has now directed the National Security Council to develop plans for subjugating Greenland’s resources, even by force. In a blunt order, he barked, “Let’s get it done.”

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How ironic: The most inefficient bureaucracy in government turns out to be Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency.”

That could be humorous, except that DOGE—a creature of the right-wing Project 2025—has been devastating to millions of people. And it’s about to get worse. Elon Musk—the flighty überrich autocrat put in charge of “efficiency” by his buddy Trump—is now going after the Social Security deposits of 73 million senior citizens.

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But wait, hasn’t Trump himself promised (loudly and often) that he would not ax this essential retirement program? Yes… but Elon is his “gotcha.”

Rather than an honest kill, Musk is strangling the program with (believe it or not) bureaucratic red tape. Claiming to cutting waste, he’s eliminating 7,000 people who administer the program, shouting, “Bureaucratic excess!” Except, Social Security is actually a renowned model of government efficiency, spending less than 1 percent of its revenue on administration.

So by whacking the people who do the work, Musk is actually whacking the people who’re due to receive their earned benefits. For example, he’s decreed that the public no longer apply for benefits or resolve questions by phone, but now, must now travel in person to some distant Social Security office. But the staff there has also been decimated, so people who’ve come from afar are told to go back home and call for an appointment. Yes… a call that will not be answered.

This is Jim Hightower saying… What’s at work here is a Musk-Trump ploy to wreck Social Security’s remarkable record of efficiency. Their intent is to make the service so bad that they can then let profiteering corporations can privatize your retirement.

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As Trump & Co. hurl horror after horror at us from the murky darkness of their extremely wasteful “war on government waste,” I think of Lily Tomlin, who said years ago: “No matter how cynical you get, it’s almost impossible to keep up.”

But no need to swat frantically at their every assault. Their blitzkrieg against everything at once is an intentional ploy to divide us into small, separate scrambles to save this and that, rather than rallying a unified, furious opposition to them. The evil is not in the budget cuts, but in the cutters.

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Second, let’s be clear that their war-on-waste is NOT about eliminating useless taxpayer expenditures. Note that Elon Musk, Trump’s silly “efficiency czar,” ignores such walloping waste as Pentagon boondoggles and tax scams for überrich hucksters… like him.

But—by gollies!—those budget-whacking plutocrats are fearless when it comes to killing essential benefits for regular people. A longstanding energy program, for example, helps very-low-income families across America pay to heat their homes in bitter winters, and to cool homes in areas of brutal heat. It saves lives—efficiently!—being administered by a staff of only 25. But this month, Trump’s government reform thugs stormed in, fired all 25, and shut down the program. As Sen. Ed Markey said, “This isn’t reform. It’s sabotage.”

This is Jim Hightower saying… Exactly! Soft words like “efficiency” are their knives for castrating government of, by, and for The People, allowing a cabal of Trump, Musk, and allied financial elites to impose a moneyed monarchy over America. But remember our history—we democratic rebels won all-out wars in the 1770s and 1860s to defeat them. So, toughen up, here they come again.

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Years ago, an iconic bar named “Another Raw Deal” was a regular hangout for us irreverent, free-spirited, political progressives in Austin, Texas. Even those push-button, hot-air hand dryers in its restrooms were political—printed on the big chrome button was this instruction: “Push here for a message from Sen. Phil Gramm.”

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Mercifully, Gramm is gone, but political hot air is still gushing from the likes of Rep. Pat Fallon, an Elon-Musk-hugging, plutocratic congress critter from Texas. Lately, however, Pat has been learning the hard way that folks back home don’t share his fan-boy crush on the South African billionaire, who is gleefully chainsawing crucial public programs that even Republican families count on. So, Fallon’s own constituents are howling at him to do something!

He is: This aloof and clueless “public servant” has erupted in a mad dog attack on the locals! At a recent town hall event in his red district, voters were furious that Musk is targeting the Social Security benefits they’ve earned. Fallon barked that “no one has said they’re cutting Social Security.” But one of his voters shot back: “Elon says it every day.” Indeed Musk is trying to kill it with lies, falsely attacking it as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”

Then, Fallon stumbled into the GOP’s briar patch of class bias, curtly proposing “a different deal” to replace Social Security. “If you want to retire,” he instructed, plan when you’re young and “work two jobs.” Of course, millions already do—and the pay still doesn’t cover basic expenses, much less provide savings for retirement.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Now that’s a raw deal! Did I mention that Fallon, a multimillionaire congressman, gets a lavish, paid-for-by-you-and-me public pension?

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America’s family farmers were astonished recently to get a jolly tweet from the President of the United States: “Have fun!” exclaimed The Donald.

Fun? The farm economy is in the ditch, with crop prices at depression levels and bankruptcies surging. Plus, Trump Inc. is now rigging the law to give agribusiness monopolies more power to run roughshod over farmers and rural communities.

Well, yes, say the billionaire “geniuses” and partisan hacks who’ve seized control of farm and food policies, but our phantasmagoric laissez-fairyland ideology will open up new agricultural markets here at home, so see? Fun!

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Those ideologues, however, can’t make chicken salad out of chicken manure, and that’s what their promises are. While Brooke Rollins, Trump’s corporatized ag secretary, babbles about “new” markets—but she actually shut down a nationwide market last month that provided a billion dollars a year to family farmers who produce for local schools, food pantries, etc. In reality, Rollins’ goal is an industrialized, globalized food economy, so she coldly dismissed these local sales as “nonessential.” Of course, that says to all of the people involved that her government considers them nonessential.

Combining arrogance with ignorance, Trump’s aloof plutocrats carelessly wiped out this market right at spring planting time! Each farm family has already taken out thousands of dollars in bank loans to buy seeds and other essential supplies to make this year’s crop, but—WHAMMO!—Trump & Co. slammed the door on the family’s most reliable market, shoving them to the brink of broke… and beyond.

This is Jim Hightower saying… This is what happens when clueless billionaires are brought in to make our public programs “efficient.” Corporate rule is never efficient—and it sure ain't fun.

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Let us embrace the darkness.

Not the political dark ages being pushed on us by today’s regressive right-wing forces, but nature’s own pure darkness of night. Unfortunately, we Homo Sapiens have largely blacked out nature’s billions of beacons in the night sky, which have both dazzled and guided Earth’s creatures for eons.

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Ironically, the tool used to wash out natural light… is light! In all cities and most towns, the glare of artificial lighting has pulled an impervious curtain across our sky. Especially garish (and entirely useless) is the lighting of corporate skyscrapers throughout the night with blinding spotlights that keep us from seeing the genuinely majestic view beyond.

I was lucky as a child to spend summer evenings on my Aunt Eula’s farm, entranced as darkness fell and the celestial show began. But today, most children don’t even know it’s there. Indeed, 80 percent of Americans never see the stream of the Milky Way galaxy that is our home – much less seeing the spectacular cosmic beams shining from trillions of miles beyond.

This doesn’t mean we should just stumble around in the dark. Of course we need light, but try a little common sense. One, stop spotlighting buildings. Two, don’t point outdoor lighting up at the sky– shine it down on our streets, parking lots, stadiums, and porches where the illumination is actually needed. Three, remember that there’s an off switch. And even small steps can make a big difference. After all, all we’re giving up is bad lighting.

This is Jim Hightower saying… We can have the light we need and still let nature’s sky be the star. The good news is that towns, cities, and even countries have begun adopting such sensible lighting policies. To help do this where you live, go to DarkSky International: darksky.org.

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Texas: What the Hell?

Once again, my state’s GOP hierarchy is leading the nation in creative ways to increase corporate power over people’s rights. This time, lawmakers are rushing to protect corrupt executives from legal challenges by their own shareholders!

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Their law would ban rank-and-file owners of corporate giants from suing their CEOs and other top officials for financial malfeasance. In particular, it’s a heavy-handed attempt to prohibit shareholders from suing bosses who lavish shareholder funds on extravagant pay and luxury perks for themselves.

But leave it to Lone Star Republicans to make a bad law worse. Indeed, they say they only want to bar suits by “pesky” small investors—people who own less than three percent of a corporation’s stock. But that’s a flimflam, since almost no one owns more than three percent of any big corporation. And the few who do are huge Wall Street operators and multibillionaires—and they’re not about to sue a fellow-richie for being greedy.

So the Texas law would effectively institutionalize a corrupt, closed-loop protection racket, freeing self-serving executives from internal accountability.

Speaking of corrupt, who wrote this boondoggle? It’s sponsored by Dustin Burrows, the top official of the Texas House, but he doesn’t write bills—he totes bills written by big campaign donors, corporate lobbyists, and right-wing extremists. In this case, he’s working for all three.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Burrows brags that his scam will be a boon for our state, because it’ll prompt CEOs everywhere to move their corporations here to take advantage of this law. Sure—corporations up to no good! Who needs ‘em? And if they set a precedent in Texas, I guarantee you they’ll be pushing it in your state next.

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