“MAGA,” blusters Donald Trump – Make America Great Again! America’s ranching families, however, would like Trump to come off his high horse and get serious about a more modest goal, namely: Make America COOL Again.

COOL stands for Country-of-Origin-Labeling, a straightforward law simply requiring that agribusiness giants put labels on packages of steak, pork chops, etc. to tell us whether the meat came from the USA, China, Brazil… or Whereintheworldistan. This useful information empowers consumers to decide where their families’ food dollars go. But multinational powerhouses like Tyson Foods and Cargill don’t want you and me making such decisions.

So, in 2012, the meat monopolists got the World Trade Organization to decree that our nation’s COOL law violated global trade rules – and our corporate-submissive congress critters meekly repealed the law.

Then came Donald Trump and his Made-in-America campaign, promising struggling ranchers that he’d restore the COOL label as a centerpiece of his new NAFTA deal. Ranching families cheered because getting that “American Made” brand on their products would mean more sales and better prices.

But wait – Trump has now issued his new US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, and… Where’s the beef? In his grandiose, 1,809-page document, COOL is not even mentioned!

Worse, slaps America’s hard-hit ranching families in the face for it allows multinational meatpackers to keep shipping foreign beef into the US market that does not meet our food safety standards! Aside from the “yuck” factor and health issues, this gives Tyson and other giants an incentive to abandon US ranchers entirely.

To stand with America’s farm and ranch families against their betrayal by Trump and the Big Food monopolists, contact the National Farmers Union: NFU.org.

Once upon a time, there was a place where the prevailing ethic of the very richest people was that monetary self-indulgence was tacky and that wealth was a matter of good fortune, carrying with it an obligation to the Common Good.

Believe it or not, that place was the USA! Where did it go?

Read the full commentary here.

Once upon a time, there was a place where the prevailing ethic of the very richest people was that monetary self-indulgence was tacky and that wealth was a matter of good fortune, carrying with it an obligation to the Common Good.

Believe it or not, that place was the USA! Where did it go?

The prevailing ethic of today’s billionaire’s club is one of entitlement, superiority, and grandiosity – including flaunting their wealth like the robber barons of old. For example, a ludicrously large “house” is under construction in Florida for one of our modern-day barons, boasting 11 kitchens, five swimming pools, and a 30 car garage.

Worse, the billionaire class is asserting its sense of plutocratic privilege by weaponizing their huge fortunes. They’ve been spending massively (and often secretly) to build a culture of inequality across our land. To their dismay, however, America’s workaday majority is rebelling, with newly-elected democratic populists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposing a 70 percent tax rate on incomes above $10 million. “Oh, the horror,” shrieked billionaires like computer magnate Michael Dell: “Name a country where that’s worked,” he demanded dismissively.

Okay, Michael: How about the United States?

Yes, between the end of World War II in 1945 and Ronald Reagan’s start of coddle-the-rich government in 1981, the top tax rate never fell below 70 percent – and that was a period of unparalleled growth and prosperity for America’s middle class.

Dell, who lives in a sprawling 33,000-square-foot house with all the charm of a shopping mall, confuses value with money and has no grasp of the essential richness of American egalitarianism. We should not be listening to people like him (much less being governed by them) just because they are rich.

“Dell CEO Joins Davos Debate on 70% Tax Rate: ‘Not Supportive,’” Bloomberg, January 23, 2019.

“The Wealthiest Didn’t Always Need $238 Million Penthouses,” The New York Times, January 26, 2019.

“Even in Jaded New York, A $238 Million Penthouse Turns Heads,” The New York Times, January 25, 2019.

“Inside Michael Dell’s Sprawling Property Empire,” Mission Global, March 22, 2018.

“The Lost Decade of the Middle Class,” Pew Research Center, August 22, 2012.

Corporate bosses don’t talk about it in public, but among themselves – psssst – they whisper excitedly about implementing a transformative “AI agenda” across our economy.

AI stands for artificial intelligence, the rapidly-advancing digital technology of creating thinking robots that program themselves, act on their own, and even reproduce themselves. These automatons are coming soon to a workplace near you!

Not wanting to stir a preemptive rebellion by human workers, corporate chieftains avoid terms like automation of jobs, instead substituting euphemisms like “digital transformation” of work. Privately, however, top executives see AI as their path to windfall profits and personal enrichment by replacing whole swaths of their workforce with an automated army of cheap machines that don’t demand raises, take time off, or form unions.

As one prominent tech exec confided to the New York Times, AI “will eliminate 40 percent of the world’s jobs within 15 years.” Some CEOs are so giddy about AI’s profiteering potential that they openly admit their intentions. Take Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics giant hailed as a job creating savior last year by Donald Trump. It was given $3 billion in public subsidies to open a huge manufacturing plant in Wisconsin, but it’s now reneging and declaring that it intends to replace 80 percent of its global workforce with robots within 10 years. Corporate apologists say displaced humans can be “reskilled” to do something else. But what? Where? When? No response.

Executives try to skate by the human toll by saying that the machine takeover is the inevitable march of technological progress. Hogwash! There’s nothing “natural” about the AI agenda – it’s a choice being made by an elite group of corporate and political powers trying to impose their selfish interests over us.

The great thing about corporate giants is that they are such amazing business innovators. For example, in the category of “wheel-spinning” innovation – ie, trying to change a corporation’s course without actually changing anything – it’s hard to top McDonald’s. For several years, the fast-food chain has been losing customers to younger chains with healthier, more-stylish offerings. So, CEO Steve Easterbrook has tried to recoup the losses with PR tricks, such as calling the menu “healthy” and “fresh.” But a McNugget and fries are still what they are, so people have not bitten the PR bait.

Now, though, – Eureka! – he’s hit on an innovation that’ll surely cause hungry eaters to flock to the Golden Arches: Artificial Intelligence. Yes, exclaimed Steve-The-Innovator, consumers need a robotic order-taker to advise them on what to order – based on AI’s ability to digest unlimited data about the weather, traffic, time of day, and what other people are ordering. “Decision technology” it’s called, and the CEO spent 300 million McDollars to buy these so-called thinking machines, which the maker claims will provide “the rapid and scalable creation of highly-targeted digital interactions.” Now, what could be more inviting than that?

Easterbrook adds excitedly that his innovative deployment of this artificial intelligence network will provide an “even more personalized customer experience.” Sure, Steve, nothing like more computers to add a warm, personal touch to make a meal more appealing.

Far from helping customers, McDonald’s snazzy, new AI ordering system will be helping the corporation by silently compiling personal information on you, ranging from your “movement patterns” to your license plate number. As Easterbrook admits, McDonald’s will use the technology to “make the most” of the data collected.

“McDonald’s drive-through goes AI,” Austin American Statesman, April 14, 2019.

“McDonald’s is spending $300 million to be more like Amazon,” Fast Company, March 26, 2019.

“You want AI with that? McDonald’s buys into machine learning,” BBC News, March 27, 2019.

“McDonald’s new drive-thru menus will change based on the weather, traffic, and time of day,” Vox, March 27, 2019.

Language matters. For example, the words that corporate and government officials use to report on the health of America’s economy can either make clear to us commoners what’s going on – or hide and even lie about the reality we face.

Read the full commentary here.

Fats Domino sings: “I found my thrill, on Blueberry Hill.” Maybe, but America’s richest corporate powers know precisely where to find their thrill: On Capitol Hill!

They rushed there in 2017 with a passion hotter than high school love, spewing the pheromones of campaign cash into the Republican congressional caucus. Sure enough, the GOP Congress came through for the corporations, satisfying their lust to have their tax rate lowered from 35 percent to 21 percent – lower than a modest-income working stiff pays.

Actually, the corporate elites had not been paying anywhere near 35 percent, since they used dozens of loopholes to cut their average rate to about 13 percent. Yet, Republican lawmakers coddled these privileged giants with a rate cut – plus they kept intact most of those gaping loopholes. Thus, many corporate behemoths paid zero in federal taxes this year. Or less!

How is it possible to pay less than zero? By riddling the tax code with so many special deductions and gimmicks that the government owes you money! On tax day this year, a watchdog group called ITEP (Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy) issued a report documenting that 60 of America’s biggest corporations used the GOP’s tax cut and special breaks to avoid paying a dime in taxes on the $79 billion in profits they’d hauled in.

Indeed, they were given millions of dollars in rebates from our public treasury. For example, Amazon, which had $11 billion in profit last year, paid zero in federal income tax, instead plucking $126 million in rebates from us. Likewise, Chevron, John Deere, GM, and Prudential grabbed more than $100 million.

This plutocratic ripoff is so shameful and unAmerican that a group of embarrassed rich people are calling for its repeal. For information go to PatrioticMillionaires.org.

“How Each House Member Voted on the Tax Bill,” New York Times, December 19, 2017,

“FACT SHEET: CORPORATE TAX RATES,” Americans for Tax Fairness

PatrioticMillionaires.org

“Corporate Tax Avoidance Remains Rampant Under New Tax Law,” Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, April 11, 2019.

How thrilling was tax day for you?

I refer, of course, to the thrill of getting that big juicy reduction in your taxes, thanks to the $1.5 trillion tax cut that Donald Trump and the Republicans passed. Remember? They promised it would deliver a 7-course dinner for everyone! Middle-class Americans should be grateful to the GOP, said Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, because “you have more money in your pocket.”

Uh… actually, Mitch, no. While the richest one-tenth of one percent of taxpayers wallowed in more than $100,000 each from your skewed giveaway, the great majority of us have now learned that our 7-course dinner is a possum and a 6-pack! At most. Indeed, an April poll by the Wall Street Journal reveals that only 17 percent of Americans can detect that they got any tax cut at all.

In fact, the Republican tax bill was a cynical bait-and-switch job from the start. They did make a small, highly-publicized cut in the middle-class’ tax rate, but – hocus-pocus – they quietly disappeared that benefit by eliminating or reducing various tax deductions that those families had been entitled to.

Also, by cutting about a trillion dollars from the tax payments owed by the richest corporations and people, they clearly were going to nuclearize the federal deficit. So, to overcome that political hurdle, they resorted to the hoariest rhetorical trick of demagogic political scoundrels: The BIG LIE, which Trump & Company repeated loudly and constantly. The giveaway, intoned a smirking McConnell to the media, will not gut government revenues, but will be a “revenue-producer.” Of course, it was not, instead skyrocketing our country’s deficit, which is now projected to surpass a trillion dollars next year.

That wasn’t a thrill that people felt on tax day – it was a financial chill.

“On Tax Day, many Americans don’t think the tax cut helped them,” CBS News, April 15, 2019.

“Trump gave most Americans a tax cut and they didn’t notice,” Austin American Statesman, April 16, 2019.

The core idea of the “civic commons” is that we can be a self-governing people. A noble aspiration!

But achieving it requires a basic level of community-wide communication – a reliable resource that digs out truths so people know enough about what’s going on to be self-governing. This is the role long-played by newspapers – papers that are not merely in our communities, but of, by, and for them.

Of course, since they’re mostly establishment, profit-seeking entities, papers have commonly (and often infamously) fallen far short of their noble democratic purpose. Overall, though, a town’s daily makes for a more robust civic life by investing large and essential sums of journalistic resources in truthtelling.

However, who owns it matters, as some 1,500 of our towns have learned in recent years after Wall Street’s corporate demigods of greed have swept in without warning to seize their paper, gut its journalistic mission, and devour its assets. For example, Digital First Media, a huge private-equity profiteer, snatched the St. Paul Pioneer Press and, demanding a ridiculous 25 percent profit margin from its purchase, stripped the newsroom staff from a high of 225 journalists to 25!

Robert Kuttner reported last December in The American Prospect that these tyrannical private equity firms are just paper constructs, producing nothing but profits for absentee speculators. The firms pull off their heist by exploiting three loopholes: (1) an exemption from disclosing their financing; (2) an unlimited tax deduction for the money they borrow to take over newspapers; and (3) a perversion of bankruptcy law that lets them escape the debt they rack up.

Our right to a free press is meaningless if Wall Street thieves can destroy our presses. For more information, go to dfmworkers.org.