Let’s talk Turkey!

No, not the Butterball sitting in the Oval Office. I’m talking about the real thing, the big bird, 46 million of which we Americans will devour on this Thanksgiving Day.

Get the full commentary here.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote of being leery of a fast-talking huckster who visited his home: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons,” Emerson exclaimed.

Likewise, today’s workaday families should do a mass inventory of their silverware, for the fast-talking CEOs of 181 union-busting, tax-cheating, environment-contaminating, consumer-gouging corporations are asking us to believe that they stand with us in the fight against… well, against them. From Wall Street banksters to Big Oil polluters, these profiteers are suddenly trumpeting their future intentions to serve not just their own greed, but every “stakeholder” (which is what they call employees, customers, supplies, et al).

But vague proclamations are cheap, and it’s worth noting that these new champions of the common good propose no specifics – no actual sacrifices by them or benefits for us. A few media observers have mildly objected, saying it’s “an open question” whether any of the corporate proclaimers will change how they do business. But it’s not an open question at all. They won’t. They won’t support full collective bargaining power for workers, won’t join the public’s push to get Medicare for All, won’t stop using monopoly power to squeeze out small competitors and gouge consumers, won’t support measures to stop climate change, won’t back reforms to get their corrupt corporate money out of our politics… won’t embrace any of the big structural changes necessary to reverse the raw economic and political inequality that has enthroned their plutocratic rule.

In fact, their empty proclamation is what West Texas cowboys might call “bovine excrement,” meant to fend off the actual changes that real reformers are advancing. Corporate elites won’t fix inequality for us – they’re the ones doing it to us.

“C.E.O.s Should Fear A Recession,” The New York Times, August 22, 2019.

“How Shareholder Democracy Failed the People,” The New York Times, August 20, 2019.

For millions of people around the globe – especially young people – the pressing issue of our time is this: The world is on fire! On fire with climate change, creating a new and intensifying norm of deadly weather extremes that make a dystopian future a distinct possibility – constant wildfires, rising seas, desertification, global crop failures, widespread hunger, water shortages, etc.

Luckily, we are a sentient species with the scientific ability to know that the chief cause of this global destruction is not angry gods, but us – specifically humankind’s massive extraction and burning of oil, gas, coal, and other fossil fuels. So, there’s a rising chorus of people shouting “FIRE!” And, sure enough, our national government is rushing to the scene to put it out.

Unfortunately, our president and his crew of right-wing fire-breathers in Congress are not directing the government’s hoses at the corporate extractors, but at us, the people, scientists, environmentalists, and other activists who’ve dared to point to the flames and call for global action to stop the conflagration. They seem to think the problem will go away if they can make the protesters go away.

Worse, they’re fanning the flames by turning the EPA into the PPA – the Polluters Protection Agency. They’re slashing dozens of public restraints on the polluters, while also opening up our oceans and wilderness areas to their polluting greed and stalling the rational shift to a green energy future.

The good news is that the people are revolting (in the very best sense of that term!) against our corrupt leaders’ rush toward climate catastrophe. Our hope is not in “leaders,” but ourselves – as it has been throughout American history. From the Boston Tea Party forward, creative and gutsy public protest has been democracy’s best friend.

I love those nature shows that probe the behavior and intelligence of birds, elephants, and other fellow creatures.

However, there’s one exotic critter the shows have ignored, and it’s crying out for analysis: Humanoid super-richinoids. While some in this rare species seem like normal homo sapiens, as a group the super-richinoids exhibit aberrant, destructive tendencies. In particular, an insatiable desire to accumulate boundless personal wealth, as if one’s net worth is one’s true worth. They view life as a primal competition to be No. 1, the richest of all!

Robert Frank, an analyst of plutocracy, points to the insane competitive zealotry of Larry Ellison, the multibillionaire co-founder of Oracle. Frank writes that when Ellison learned that a rival billionaire was having a 400-foot yacht built (a boat one-third bigger than a football field!), Ellison rushed out to get a 450-foot yacht.

Toys are one thing, but the überrich tend to feel entitled to exploit rank and file workers, crush smaller competitors, pay no taxes, rip-off consumers, defraud investors, contaminate our environment, buy elections, monopolize markets – and demand to be publicly celebrated and idolized.

But when poked, these wannabe demigods turn into wimps! Now that their freakish greed is being denounced by the American majority and politicians of both parties, the royals are squealing like pigs stuck in a fence. Their hubris is being openly mocked – and I suspect that their whimpering is due to their finally realizing that their bloated net worth can’t buy respect… and they can’t handle that reality.

We’ve got to quit celebrating and catering to these flighty corporate profiteers, and get back to building a real economy based on the productivity and true genius of America’s grassroots entrepreneurs and workers.

“Attack of the Wall Street Snowflakes,” The New York Times, November 11, 2019.

“The Idle Rich? They Wish,” The New York Times, October 20, 2019.

The one thing you never want to hear your dentist say is: “Oops!”

It’s also alarming to hear that from a former-US senator, 25 years after he’d passed a temporary oil subsidy for Big Oil. With world petroleum prices low at the time, Sen. J. Bennett Johnston pushed through a special break in 1995, temporarily exempting the giants from paying federal royalty fees for the publicly-owned crude they take from the Gulf of Mexico. The idea was to give a brief reprieve on royalties to encourage oil corporations to drill here.

But – Oops! – our lawmakers made a costly slip up: They forgot to specify in the law that the exemption was temporary – once market prices recovered, the corporations were to resume payments to us taxpayers. “It was never the intent that everybody would get a free ride forever,” says one official.

Sure enough, market prices recovered by 2006, yet, the oil barons simply thumbed their nose at the public saying, “Tough luck, suckers!” Since there’s no limit written in the law, they’ve just kept sucking up all the public oil they can without paying a dime in royalties.

This is no petty thievery. Chevron, Shell, Exxon, BP, and even China’s state-run oil corporation are among the giants that have taken at least $18 billion from our nation’s treasury so far – and their haul increases every day that they’re allowed to pump up profits through this unintended loophole.

The only thing bigger than Big Oil’s avarice is its arrogance. The industry recently warned Congress not to even try plugging the loophole, claiming such an attempt would be “engaging in a dangerous game of bait and switch.” But – hello Big Oil – one force bigger than you is an infuriated public.

To help spread the fury and stop this thievery, go to SierraClub.org/topics/oil.

“An 18 Billion Loophole Enriches Oil Companies,” New York Times, October 25, 2019.

Donald Trump’s idea of a good farm program seems to be “Hee Haw.” On a recent trip to Wisconsin, he drew guffaws from the state’s hard-hit dairy farmers by proclaiming that – thanks to his policies – the farm economy was looking good. “We’re over the hump,” he gloated.

Perhaps The Donald thought that farmers are rubes, unable to do simple math. But those dairy farmers were painfully aware that it costs them $1.90 to produce a gallon of milk, but the processing giants that control the milk market are paying them only $1.35 a gallon. That 55-cent-a-gallon loss quickly adds up to a huge loss of income, and a devastating loss of farm families – Wisconsin lost 638 dairy farms last year and another 551 so far this year.

Far from “over the hump,” farm prices have been further depressed by Trump’s tariff clash with China – US dairy sales to China fell by 54 percent in just the first half of this year. Meanwhile, monopoly power is crushing prices – an $8 billion behemoth named Dean Foods now controls 90 percent of Wisconsin’s milk market, empowering it to commit daylight robbery, blatantly stealing farmers’ product… and farms.

Yet, Ag Secretary Sonny Perdue – the one national official who’s supposed to stand up for farmers – nonchalantly kissed them off, smugly declaring it natural that the big devour the small. So, he professes, there’s nothing he can do for family operators except tell them to “go out” of agriculture.

Perdue and Trump are simply inept stewards of America’s farm economy. Time for a change. One who is offering a path to a revitalized, family-farm-based food system that’ll break the corporate stranglehold over US agriculture is Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Download a summary of her comprehensive proposal for “A New Farm Economy” at ElizabethWarren.com/Plans/New-Farm-Economy.

“The devastation of farm country is biting us all on the butt,” Hightower Lowdown, May 2019.

“Wisconsin Governor Rips Sonny Perdue For Warning Small Dairy Farms Won’t Make It,” The Huffington Post, October 4, 2019.

Government by the rich is called plutocracy. Government by police power is autocracy. Government by thieves is kleptocracy. Government by Trump and gang, however, is all of the above, which adds up to something called kakistocracy – government by the very worst people in our society.

The media have covered the antics of many of the kakistocrats he’s appointed, but it’s time to shine a light on one of the obscure characters in the Trump cabinet: Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue of Georgia. Hailing from a state renown for its peanut crop, Sonny turns out to be the biggest goober of all! He had been a non-entity, blithely sitting in his ornate office while farm prices plummeted, bankruptcies spread, and farmer suicides surged.

But on October first, Sonny suddenly spoke out about the distress of farm families – not to offer assistance, but to slap them right in the face! “In America,” he smugly lectured, “the big get bigger, and the small go out.” Goobering on, Perdue explained: “[We don’t] for any small business have a guaranteed income or guaranteed profitability.”

What a heap of pious BS! Family farmers are not asking for a guaranteed profit – just a chance at making a profit. Today’s ag system has deliberately been rigged by policy makers so bankers and other corporate giants that farm farmers can stiff those who actually produce our food, then grab the profits for themselves. Indeed, the median profit of farmers last year was – get this – minus $1,500!

There’s nothing natural or inevitable about the big getting bigger and the small “going out.” All it takes are inept or corrupt do-nothing public officials to turn their backs while agribusiness powers plow under thousands of good family farmers. That is the essence – of the Donnie and Sonny farm policy.

 

“Trump agriculture chief: No guarantee small farms can survive,” https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/463955-trump-agriculture-chief-no-guarantee-small-farms-can-survive, October 1, 2019.

“’Unacceptable’: Family Farms, Ag Advocates Hit Back After Sec Perdue Says Small Dairy Farms Destined to Die,” https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/10/02/unacceptable-family-farms-ag-advocates-hit-back-after-sec-perdue-says-small-dairy, October 2, 2019.

The rich are different from you and me. For one thing, they’re rich.

Among the super-rich, though, there tends to be a peculiar sense that their net worth is a testament to their true worthiness. Thus, they seem to cling desperately to the very idea of being extremely wealthy. This leads to one specific difference between them and us: Most of us favor a wealth tax to help bridge the gaping chasm of inequality in our society; the rich do not.

Indeed, we hear shrieks of abject horror and cries of doom coming from corporate board rooms and other defenders of the plutocratic order. It would be comical if they weren’t so pathetic. They exclaim that such a tax will “destroy” entrepreneurial motivation, “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 asserts that super-wealthy people like him would “be happy to pay more in taxes.” But he fears the government would just squander it on giveaways “to interest groups and stuff like that.” I have to admit that Jamie does know his “stuff” – after all, he weaseled billions of dollars from us taxpayers to bail out his bank during the 2007 Wall Street crash. Far from squandering revenues on such welfare cases as Dimon, those supporting the wealth tax specifically call for the money to fund universal access to higher education, free healthcare for All, restoration and expansion of our national infrastructure, and other direct efforts to restore the common good.

To help advance passage of the wealth tax – and our nation’s democratic ideals – go to Citizens for Tax Justice: www.ctj.org.

 

“For or Against, Taxing the Rich Rouses Passion,” The New York Times, October 2, 2019,

 

Corporate mega-mergers keep being announced with great hoopla, but – as we’ve learned from promises made by merging airlines, banks, drugmakers, etc. – most are likely to deliver less than nothing. Take 2015’s ballyhooed combine of two food giants, Kraft and Heinz. Today, the merged colossus has become a shamble, far less than either had been separately. What happened? Greed.

3G, a Brazilian investment outfit, was the primary driver of the merger, and it promptly installed its financial hotshots as top execs. Unfortunately, they imposed a rigid bit of managerial humbuggery that amounted to the practice of corporate thuggery – cut employees, divert revenues to the new owners, buy up other corporations… and repeat the plunder.

Suddenly, instead of focusing on improving products, Kraft Heinz was riveted on the minutia of cost-cutting, firing thousands of employees and even removing the company’s snacks that had been offered to employees at meetings.

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, 3G has started bailing out of the wreckage it created, selling 25 million of its Kraft-Heinz 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.

Here’s a recipe for you: Chop up some Oscar Mayer wieners, stir in Heinz ketchup, blend with Cool Whip and Maxwell House Coffee, sprinkle Planters peanuts over the mixture, add A-1 Steak Sauce, then top it with Cheez Whiz and blast it in the microwave.

Sounds like a gloppy mess, but an even messier version was cooked up in 2015 when Kraft Foods merged with H.J. Heinz, thus conglomerating more than 200 brand-name products – including all of the above – into one $28 billion-a-year behemoth. The combine was hailed at the time as a whiz-bang deal that would prove that bigger is always better.

Uh… 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, shareholders are suing, regulators are investigating, employees are dispirited, and… well, as some business journalists have put it, the mega-merger is a mega-mess.

The Kraft Heinz consolidation was engineered from outside by a Brazilian corporate takeover outfit named 3G, in cahoots with US 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 profit 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.