High-dollar corporate executives and Wall Street bankers keep telling us that it’s lonely at the top. Well, they should try toiling at the bottom of America’s pay scale.

The radical rise of inequality in our society is a function of the vast political inequality separating the working class from the power structure. The elite rich have many friends in high places paying close attention to their needs, but the further one tumbles down the economic ladder the lonelier you are when your interests conflict with the bosses and big shots. As Ray Charles sang, “Them that’s got is them that gets.”

Consider waiters, bartenders, and other restaurant workers. Generally these jobs are poorly paid and routinely abusive, yet lawmakers mostly ignore all that, cozying up to the abusers, because… well, they’re rich and politically connected. As a result, most of today’s restaurant workers are paid a sub-minimum wage that was set 32 years ago at $2.13 an hour! That’s not a wage, it’s an insult. Yet most lawmakers refuse to raise it, bowing to the piles of campaign cash they get through a lobbying front called the National Restaurant Association, dominated by multibillion-dollar food chains.

Worse, in the past decade, this consortium of greedy wage suppressors even devised a diabolical scheme to make restaurant workers pay for the industry’s lobbying campaigns to hold down wages! The Association bought an outfit that provides hokey food safety training to workers, then it lobbied to get California, Florida, Illinois, Texas, and other states to require that all employees not only undergo the silly on-line training course, but also making them pay $15 each for the training.

Guess what? NRA then uses those worker training fees to fund its lobbying efforts that let restaurants pay poverty wages. And that, kids, is how inequality happens.

Do something!

One Fair Wage is on the front lines of organizing service industry workers, minimum wage workers, and other working class people to get the pay these workers deserve.

Extra credit: the history of tipping in the US is entirely rooted in racist antebellum culture as a way to exploit the labor of formerly enslaved people.

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Question: How many legs does a dog have if you count the tail as a leg? Answer: Four – calling the tail a leg doesn’t make it one.

Likewise, calling a small group of partisan lawyers a “supreme” court doesn’t make it one. There’s nothing supreme about the six-pack of far-right-wing political activists who are presently soiling our people’s ideals of justice by proclaiming their own anti-democratic biases to be the law of the land. On issues of economic fairness, women’s rights, racial justice, corporate supremacy, environmental protection, theocratic rule, and other fundamentals, these unelected, black-robed extremists are imposing an illegitimate elitist agenda on America that the people do not want and ultimately will not tolerate.

Indeed, the imperiousness of the six ruling judges has already caused the court’s public approval rating to plummet, to a mere 38 percent, an historic low that ranks down there with Trump, and threatens to go as low as Congress.

This has led to a flurry of officials attesting to the honesty and political impartiality of the reigning supremes. Unfortunately for the court, these ardent defenders were the six culprits themselves.

The “integrity of the judiciary is in my bones,” pontificated Neil Gorsuch, who now stands accused of having lied to senators to win his lifetime appointment.

“[We are not] a bunch of partisan hacks,” wailed Amy Coney Barrett, a partisan extremist jammed onto the court in a partisan ploy by Trump in the last few hours of his presidency.

“Judges are not politicians,” protested John Roberts, who became Chief Justice because he was a rabid political lawyer who pushed the Supreme Court in 2000 to reject the rights of voters and install George W. Bush as president.

Remember, in America, The People are supreme! We don’t have to accept rule by an illegitimate court. For reform, go to FixTheCourt.com.

PS— The most recent season of Slate’s Slow Burn podcast traces the rise of Neil Gorsuch. Recommended!

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Greetings, Lowdowners — Deanna here!

Friday we told you what was coming: Hightower on the main stage at the Texas Democratic Party Convention, introducing Clayton Tucker, the Lampasas rancher carrying the populist torch into this year’s fight for Texas Agriculture Commissioner.

Well, it happened. And it’s everything we hoped it would be!

Listen to that crowd roar as Hightower names the “six Bs” — bosses, bankers, billionaires, big shots, b******s, and bullshitters. That clip has been tearing up social media all weekend! Here’s the full five-minute speech: the introduction, the history, and Jim handing the mic to Clayton with the kind of send-off that doesn’t happen unless you’ve been in the fight together for a long, long time.

This is the kind of thing you get every week as a Lowdown subscriber: not just the clip everyone’s sharing, but the full context behind it. Consider upgrading today if you can!

PS—I think my personal favorite moment is watching the ASL interpreter figure out how to translate “greedheads and boneheads.” Chef’s kiss!

Transcript

Announcer: Let’s welcome our former Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Jim Hightower.

Hidey ho! As one former Texas Agriculture Commissioner, who came out of a progressive campaign with Ann Richards and Jim Mattox and Garry Mauro, a unity ticket. Now to the next era of victories by progressive forces, led by Clayton Tucker, James Talarico, Gina Hinojosa, right on down the line, a lineup of winners.

It just makes me happier than a flea at a dog show to be standing up here, looking out at all you Democratic Party champions of economic fairness, you corporate greedwhackers, you Republican butt-kickers, as we rally to take Texas back from the GOP, from the GOP autocrats and plutocrats, so our team of grassroots Democrats can move Texas forward. We don’t want to go back. We want to go forward and forward with all the people of our state, not just the rich elites.

And this November fight is a landmark populist battle, putting pitting the greedheads and boneheads who are the powers that be against the powers that ought to be, the ordinary work of day people of our state, the workers, the farmers, the teachers, the consumers. The everyday Texans who do the everyday work that makes Texas work.

Now you might say, well, Hightower, what do you by the powers that be? Well here’s what I mean. I call ‘em the six Bs. They are the bosses, the bankers, the billionaires, the big shots, b******s and bullshitters.

They’ve been running roughshod over us. They’re thinking they’re the top dog and we’re just a bunch of fire hydrants out here in the countryside. That’s why Clayton Tucker is so important. So important to this election, so important to the Democratic ticket, so important to Texas, a true son of Texas populism, a rancher raising goats out in Lampasas County. The very place where populism began, by the way, it was born in Lampasas County in the 1870s. He’s a rancher, been a kindergarten teacher. That’ll help him when he deals with the legislature.

He’s a grassroots organizer, battling the data center billionaires. He even puts it right on his campaign button here. “Stop AI data centers.” Clayton Tucker. He battles the monopolists and the extremists. I’m gonna tell you that Clayton Tucker is gonna drive the Republican leaders crazy. Of course, that’s a pretty short drive for some of them.

Most important, as Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Clayton will make us proud again, as so few office holders these days do. He comes out of West Texas. West Texas ranchers and the old cowboys out in West Texas used to have a saying. They said, “speak the truth, but ride a fast horse.”

Clayton is going to speak the truth to the powers that be. And they’re going to call him, just as they’re calling Talarico and Gina Hinojosa and our whole Democratic lineup, they’re going to call them agitators. Agitators. What the hell is wrong with being an agitator? Agitation is what built America.

So I’m here to ask you to join me in welcoming the People’s Agitator, Clayton Tucker, from Lampasas, Texas.

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Greetings, Lowdowners—Deanna here!

Last week we gave you the pesticide hearing story — Willie Nelson, Barbara Jordan, and a fight Hightower and his team won by building a movement before he ever needed the movie stars. This week, we’re going back further. All the way back to where the whole populist tradition in this country actually started.

Here’s Hightower telling it: in the 1870s, four farmers in Lampasas, Texas, were getting squeezed out of existence. Railroads gouging them on getting crops to market. Bankers gouging them on their mortgages. So they did the only thing they could — they sat down around a kitchen table and started talking about it.

That conversation didn’t stay in Lampasas. It spread to neighboring counties, then across Texas, then into 43 states. It elected U.S. senators and members of Congress. It built cooperative banks and grain storage so farmers didn’t have to sell at the bottom of the market just to survive. Historians call it the Populist Movement. Hightower calls it people figuring out they had to organize or get run over.

We’re telling you this story right now for a reason. Tonight, Hightower’s on the main stage at the Texas Democratic Convention, introducing a candidate he’s worked with for years: Clayton Tucker, who’s running for the same office Hightower once held — Texas Agriculture Commissioner.

Clayton’s from Lampasas.

No one planned that. Texas just keeps producing people who grow up with that kitchen table in their blood and decide to do something about the Powers That Be. Clayton’s campaign is built around the same basic fight those four farmers were having: rural Texans getting run over by power they have no say in. Corporate data centers draining water and electricity from small towns that never got a say. Federal regulators sitting on tools Texas ranchers need right now to fight the New World Screwworm, leaving the state to fight it understaffed and underequipped while the threat spreads. Different villains, same basic math — somebody with more power than you, making decisions about your land and your livelihood from somewhere else.

Almost a hundred and fifty years on, same county, new fights, same fight.

This is the kind of connection-the-dots storytelling our paid subscribers get from us regularly — the history that explains the present, not just the outrage of the week. If you’ve been thinking about upgrading, this is a good week for it.

Thanks for being in the fight with us, as always!

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Sometimes, little things can be a big deal. For example, in considering ways to help protect Mother Earth from global environmental rampages by us humans, look out your window.

In many cities and most suburbs, chances are you’re looking at a lawn – a grass-carpeted yard that looks almost the same as the one next door, the one next to it, etc. Some see a lush expanse of green grass as the ultimate in landscaping beauty, and some even consider a well-manicured lawn to be a measure of one’s moral character.

Beauty and piety aside, though, the spread and intensification of “lawn culture” has become an environmental extravagance that is already unsustainable in whole sections of our country, and it adds up to a steadily-increasing burden on Earth’s essential resources. Grass itself is natural, but keeping it alive across thousands of square miles is not, for it requires a deluge of chemicals and endless rivers of water applied again and again, yard after yard, trying to keep these plots green. And – O, the irony! – their “green” includes eliminating bees, butterflies… and, well, nature. One statistic tells the tale: Americans use more than 10 times more poison per acre than all of America’s farmers use on their crops.

Just glance around you, and you’ll see the grass lawn imperative at work throughout your community – it surrounds local schools, “greens-up” corporate complexes, spreads across college campuses, forms miles of golf courses, etc.

This is not a diatribe against grassy plots, which can be natural joys. But let’s get real, get creative, and get in touch with the full balance and beauty of nature. You can promote ground cover sanity right where you live with native plants, xeriscaping, organic methods, rain gardens, and “re-wilding” your yard with things like prairie grass. For help, go to Rewild.org/Rewild-Your-Life.

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Once upon a time, conservative ideologues opposed government interference in the holy magic of the marketplace.

Take energy policy, for example. Right-wing cheerleaders of fossil fuels demanded that government must keep its fat thumb off the scale of free market competition between Big Oil and those frilly new “alternative” sources of energy.

Where did those market “purists” go? Into the White House, the Cabinet, and Congress – where they’ve mutated into big government bullies, attacking renewable energy enterprises while hyping and subsidizing the corporate profiteers of dirty energy. Trump himself hasn’t merely put his thumb on the scale, he’s hauled his entire hulk onto it!

For example, this month he lavished a $700-million gimme of our tax dollars to prop up coal production, a dirty fuel the market is abandoning.

Wait, there’s more: he paid another 700+ million of our dollars to Invenergy, an offshore wind energy firm – not so it could produce electricity, but to cancel four wind farms it had planned to build. Yes, he paid the company to not produce wind energy! Trump declared that even though wind power is less costly than coal, he found windmills “ugly.”

So, here’s my advice to the wind industry: Gold-plate your turbines and label them “Trump Towers.” And maybe stage a series of cage fights on some of them. Trump is all about hype and spectacle – so there you go.

Meanwhile, the actual marketplace is loudly saying “no” to fossil fuels and YES! to renewables. Get this: Wind now routinely surpasses coal as a supplier of electricity to America. And, last month, solar power also surpassed coal. Political bullying aside, renewables are the future.

Do something!

At a time when the federal government is actively dismantling progress on climate change, the NDRC is calling for states to lead the way—and tracking the work that’s being done. Start with this news update from them, and then take action.

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Greetings, Lowdowners—Deanna here!

This summer, we're doing something a little different. Over the next few weeks, we're opening the gates a bit — giving free subscribers a taste of some of the exclusive stories, video, and behind-the-scenes Hightower that paid subscribers get regularly. If you've been on the fence about upgrading, consider this your invitation to see what you've been missing.

To kick things off, I spent a day with Hightower in Austin last month, beer in hand at ABGB, talking with him about fifty-plus years of fighting the b******s. We’ve got a summer’s worth of material to share with you, and I wanted to kick things off with the one that shows what organizing really looks like.

Here’s the setup: Hightower’s Agriculture Commissioner, and he’s just put forward the most progressive pesticide regulation in the country. The pesticide lobby is furious. So they get the governor to introduce legislation to gut his authority and make his office appointed instead of elected. Standard playbook—except for what happened next.

The hearing room they’d booked was tiny. They had to move it to the House Chamber because Hightower’s first witness was Willie Nelson. His second was Barbara Jordan. His third was the chairwoman of the Dallas Republican Women’s Organization, who didn’t love the idea of pesticides in her kids’ food either.

Not one committee member would make the motion to pass the bills. They lost without a vote.

Here’s the part I actually wanted to talk to him about, though: the celebrities weren’t the strategy. They were the payoff. Hightower’s team spent six months before that hearing building an actual coalition—farmers, farmworkers, consumers, local press. Willie and Barbara Jordan showed up because there was already a movement there to show up for. “They are the punctuation point of a movement that has already been built and is moving,” he told me. “Their presence encourages the movement,” but it doesn’t replace it.

It’s a lesson that’s aged exactly zero days in forty years: you don’t win by getting a famous person to show up at your rally. You win by doing the unglamorous work first, and then the famous person shows up because there’s something worth showing up for.

It’s your support that enables us to keep bringing the outside in, to keep sharing the ways we can fight together and have fun together. We know times are tighter than ever, and it makes your support mean even more to us. Thank you!

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I’ve always supported small business, including having my own little media operation that has long allowed me to run my mouth for a living.

One of the greatest aspects of being small – as opposed to corporation, conglomerate, or chain – is that you’re the boss. I don’t mean bossy, autocratic, “The Big Jerk.” I mean you have the flexibility to shape the enterprise according to deeper values than selfish profit and business “efficiency.” Concepts like fairness, integrity, community, diversity – even fun – come to the fore.

Despite today’s corporatized, politically-rigid economic order, such value-driven small business mavericks flourish all across America. For example, P. Terry’s Burger Stand here in Austin. Started 20 years ago by Patrick and Kathy Terry, it’s a small local chain of 38 restaurants embracing the down-home ideals of quality, affordability, and community support.

But they also nurtured a core element of good business that is too often disregarded: Employees. As Kathy put it: “We believed that taking care of people – and building a great business – were not competing ideas.” Fair wages, basic needs, respect, belonging, advancement, happiness – these are the “inputs” that actually matter to the people who do the work and, through them, generate business success.

Now the Terry’s are taking two big steps to expand their ideals. One, they’ve set up a company-wide profit-sharing system so their 1,800 employees get a share of business income in addition to their paycheck. And two, they’ve created a special trust to provide employee ownership that can carry the values into the future.

To learn more about businesses that live up to such progressive ideals, go to the National Center for Employee Ownership: nceo.org

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Step right up folks! Please don’t crowd! No need to shove, plenty here for everyone!

Welcome to the Bonanza Extravaganza of the Artificial Intelligence “BOOM.” Silicon Valley billionaires are now proposing a scheme to deliver an unbelievable windfall to “every citizen.” Tech titans like Sam Altman of OpenAI are pushing the federal government to create a “public wealth fund” to let us commoners be investment partners in building the AI wonderworld.

Lest you worry that this might be a corporate scam, note that Donald Trump, the deal-maker-in-chief, exults that letting the American public buy into the tech booms is a sure bet to “make them rich.” And Altman adds that a public investment fund would allow Joe and Jill Schmo to “participate directly in the upside of AI-driven growth.”

Wow – benevolent capitalism!

But wait – aren’t AI barons infamous greedheads who constantly rig the system for themselves, sneer at the public, and openly disdain government programs? Well… yes.

And wait again – they say We would “share in the upside” of AI, but what about the downside? Far from profitable, all of the industry’s powerhouses, including OpenAI, are losing hundreds of billions of dollars while carelessly adding trillions in new debt and – shhhh – quietly admitting that their razzle-dazzle computer fantasies might not work.

They won’t tell you this, but going bust is a real possibility. And that is why AI’s private-enterprise whizzes are now so desperately pushing us taxpayers to become their socialist “partners.” If and when they fail, your and my role is to save their bacon by demanding that “the public” deserves a government bailout.

Do something!

Want to help keep an eye on what Big Tech is trying to do with AI? Check out The Midas Project, a new AI watchdog nonprofit.

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Millions of us are mad as hell at the moneyed establishment for constantly rigging the system against America’s workaday majority.

Those riggers could save face by making some basic reforms, but instead, they’re getting mad at us for saying the system is rigged! Indeed, corporate powers have launched a PR offensive assailing what they call a “populist trend” of disgruntled people declaring that “everything is rigged.” They’re condemning anyone who talks about corporate oligarchies ripping off consumers, workers, students, and others.

But wait – that’s not a “trend,” it’s peoples’ real-life experiences with the shameful corporate health care system, price gouging by food giants, the rapacious greed of AI billionaires, the flagrant theft of people’s voting rights, the gutting of public education… and so awful much more? You don’t have to be in Who’s Who to know What’s What: The system isrigged.

Yet, the riggers demand that we “riggees” stop saying that word. One right-wing pundit whines that it’s socially destructive for malcontents to suggest our laws are being manipulated to give more and more power to corporate elites. He asserts that even talking about it “undermines voters’ faith and trust in our government.”

Trust in our government? Come on! The majority of our lawmakers openly sell themselves to corporate bidders, the White House is a shopping mall for rich donors, and the Supreme Court functions as a corporate subsidiary. It’s no secret that corrupt officials now routinely rig America’s economic and political systems for the rich. Far from prissily shutting off discussion of this scandal, we must drag it into the center of American politics… and crush it.

Do something!

To get involved in the dragging and crushing of these corrupt scandals, head over to our friends at Common Cause, commoncause.org.

Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.