Jim Hightower's Radio Lowdown

Oh, thank goodness for Donald Trump!

As millions of families struggle with the ever-rising price of groceries, The Donald is bragging that his economic policies have miraculously lowered prices, just in time for Thanksgiving. As proof, he points to Walmart, America’s largest food marketer, boasting that it cut the price of its “complete Thanksgiving dinner package” by a whopping 25 percent from a year ago! “That’s a tremendous number,” Trump exclaimed.

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But wait – before we swallow that whole, let’s peek inside Walmart’s dinner package to see what’s in there… and what’s NOT. Sure enough, using a trick called “shrinkflation,” the corporate giant has quietly removed basic Thanksgiving items that were in last year’s package, including cornbread mix, sweet potatoes, and pie. Then, it shrank the size of the servings of other items, such as cranberries and soup.

By shorting the food in each package, this year’s Walmart dinner actually costs more than last year’s. How tremendous is that?

Yet (like his wrecking ball demolition of the White House) Trump keeps trying to destroy the very idea of presidential honesty. He now rants that there is no affordability crisis in America. It’s “a complete CON JOB” by the media, he barks, consumer prices are “tumbling down”, we have “the greatest economy in history.” People should stop complaining and be grateful!

The problem for politicians who peddle such lies is that people’s everyday life experiences instantly reveal the huckster’s deception. Even for MAGA believers, it must be hard to give thanks for a president who demands praise for helping one of his profiteering backers scam millions of working-class families, who’re just trying to put food on their tables.

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As one who ekes out a modest living running my mouth on radio and Substack, I hesitate to critique others who do the same – even though I might disagree entirely and emphatically with them.

But occasionally, I see influential purveyors of conventional wisdom tromping into my area of real-life experience, pushing some political nonsense that is not only wrong, but delusive. That’s when I intrude.

Like now, a whole posse of pundits is bellowing these days that Democrats have only one path forward to avoid perpetual defeat by MAGA Republicans: “Shift to the right!” For example, New York Times right-wing sermonizer Ross Douthat, recently proclaimed that the wisdom of Democrats “repositioning” their issues and message away from progressivism “ought to be plain to anyone with eyes.” To which I say: Bovine excrement.

What’s plain to most voters (and especially to fed-up nonvoters) is that cynical partisan shiftiness is what’s wrong with both parties, creating a plutocratic realpolitik run by and for avaricious moneyed powers. I’m no New York Times pontificator, but my ground-level experience in Texas tells me that what common people really want is not more precisely-calculated positioning, but an honest stand on “little-d” democratic principle. Say what you believe… and do it!

On the very day that the Times ran a Douthat column lecturing Democrats on how to “play politics,” Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. He won by running an aggressively-progressive campaign against corporate elites, exciting the city’s widely-ignored working-class and poor voters. Instead of trying to manipulate the electorate, Mamdani expanded and inspired it. That is plainly the Democratic Party’s future.

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Years ago, Woody Guthrie wrote “Mean Talking Blues,” a stinging satire of malicious right-wing officials who take perverse pleasure in demonizing, holding down, and punishing poor people:

“I’m a big disasterJust goin’ some place to happen

I’m an organized famineStudying how I can be a little bit meaner

I laugh my loudestWhen other people cry

I hate everybody don’t think like meI’m just mean.”

What a perfect theme song for Trump’s “Project 2025” – a MAGA crusade to stomp on millions of America’s poorest families, trying to deny them access to the most basic human needs.

Needs like… food. Brooke Rollins, Trump’s multi-millionaire agriculture secretary, made crude political jokes about poor people during the GOP’s government shutdown, laughing as she schemed to cut off their food stamps. She was an “organized famine,” illegally maneuvering to deny food for 42 million hard-hit American citizens.

In addition, Project 2025 operatives want to yank health coverage from the poor – and just for meanness – they propose killing the modest program that helps impoverished families afford to have heat in their homes.

Meanwhile, Trump poses as The Great Gatsby, living in tacky opulence, while ignoring the economic mess and rank inequality created by his Roaring 20s plutocratic presidency. Indeed, the inequality is widening as he doles out hundreds of billions of our tax dollars in new giveaways to billionaires (including to his own sons).

Far from “Making America Great Again,” Trump’s most tangible achievement is to have had the White House’s Lincoln bathroom remodeled. And, in a royal touch, Trump even had a chandelier installed above the toilet. Imagine how proud Honest Abe would be.

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Oh, happy day! Thanksgiving, I mean – our annual pause for family gatherings to celebrate the rich and tasty diversity of America’s harvests.

There is, however, something decidedly distasteful that has steadily been forcing its way onto our dinner tables: Raw monopoly power. This concentration of market control in the hands of a few domineering conglomerates is decimating farm families, swindling food industry workers, and gouging consumers. Economists have a technical term for what food industry profiteers are doing to us: The term is “stealing.”

Farmers know the evil of unrestrained monopolists all too well, for they are relentlessly squeezed by two sets of them. First, everything they must buy to produce food – from seed to tractors – is controlled by non-competitive giants that charge rip-off prices. Second, when selling their products, farmers and ranchers are boxed-in by corporate cartels that only offer take-it-or-leave-it, go-broke prices.

Then, this same anti-competitive system turns on us consumers, charging grossly-inflated grocery prices that give them monopoly profits and even more market power.

This Thanksgiving dinner is a good time to tally up the ever-widening monopoly spread separating you from farmers:

* A Butterball turkey costing you $2.42 a pound, pays the farmer 6 cents per pound.

* Potatoes costing $4 a bag returns only 55 cents to farmers.

* Wheat farmers only get 13 cents from a $4.50 loaf of whole wheat bread.

* Top sirloin steak cost $16.50 per pound, but ranchers get under $4.

* Even simple lettuce is $2 to you, but pays only 29 cents to farmers.

The very idea of Thanksgiving is that We’re All In This Together. So let’s get together and bust these greedheaded monopolies. For connections, go to Family Farm Action: farmaction.us.

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An 1887 critic of Britain’s government rightly proclaimed that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” For today’s American government, though, that adage needs a small but significant amendment: Money corrupts, and absolute money corrupts absolutely.”

Washington’s pay-to-play game has long been used by corporate powers to buy particular government favors, but now the money corruption “game” is so routine, so massive, and so flagrant that it has become the government. The likes of Big Oil, Elon Musk, Wall Street lords, and high-tech hucksters buy politicians in bulk, literally usurping the people’s authority to over public policy.

But what can we do about it, especially since Democratic Party officials also plays this plutocratic game? Well, Zohran Mamdani showed us one solution last week with his grassroots populist victory over New York’s Big Money establishment to become the city’s mayor.

He ran a true people’s campaign on progressive issues and values – which he was able to do because of a populist campaign funding option the city initiated years ago called small donor public financing. This alternative provides matching dollars from a public fund for candidates who rely on small donations from regular citizens, rather than begging for big bucks from billionaires.

In Mamdani’s case, his unabashed progressivism excited long-ignored working-class voters, who contributed a few dollars each. Then, the public match added up to $13 million – enough to get his message out and organize turnout. Though he was still outspent four to one, the small donor fund provided the margin he needed to be competitive in a big race.

So far, public financing options have been adopted in 17 jurisdictions, from Arizona to Maine, Seattle to Baltimore. Why not where you live? For guidance, go to CommonCause.org.

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How about some good news for a change? News that has nothing to do with Donald Whatzizname. News you might even use.

It’s about “The Library of Things,” a real library, but different. Just as our public libraries share a wealth of publications – this one in Brunswick, Maine, also maintains a wealth of tools, devices, equipment, and other “things” for people to check-out, use, and return.

Hazel Onsrud, a creative, can-do spirit on the staff of Brunswick’s Curtis Memorial Library, initiated this commonwealth of some 1,500 products that locals can borrow for free. The New York Times reports that residents are flocking to this pragmatic, beneficial resource for the common good. And why wouldn’t they? After all, not everyone can afford a $350 KitchenAid mixer of their own, and a roto-tiller you might use once a year could be shared by many. Also, a bullhorn, a grain mill, a ukulele, an embossing machine – seriously, we should borrow, rather than thinking each of us must buy and store these things… or do without.

This concept reduces each family’s expenses, waste, and accumulation of “stuff,” while advancing cooperation and community. And the public library infrastructure is already in place to make it available.

This idea is not new, nor is it unique to Brunswick. In fact, America’s progressive populist movement of the 1870s built an entire economic alternative to corporate monopoly around this very concept. And today, some 2,000 “libraries-of-things” are already functioning worldwide, giving ordinary people a grassroots way to avoid profiteering, corporate consumerism.

Hazel Onsrud has issued a challenge to us: “If a few of us can do this in Maine,” she says “anyone can.” And you and I are the anyones to do it.

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An essential part of our children’s education is learning proper moral behavior. And who better to deliver that ethical guidance than politicians?

Huh? Bizarre, yet this is the conclusion of the GOP’s theocratic Christian Nationalist faction. They are demanding that legislatures across the country must intervene in local educational policy to require that all public schools plaster every classroom with Christianity’s Ten Commandments. It’s in-your-face religiosity, forcing one religious dogma on students of every faith. It’s also ludicrously hypocritical – after all, legislators are notorious for committing adultery, stealing from the poor, killing in the name of the state, bearing false witness against immigrants, bowing down to false gods… and otherwise mocking the Christian religion’s own commandments. Who do these nationalists and their politicians think they’re fooling?

Certainly not America’s free-thinking students. If you wonder whether young people will just go along, take heart in the uplifting thoughts of Arjun Sharda, a high-school freshman in Round Rock, Texas. In a recent op-ed piece, he went right at the humbuggery of the state’s Republican leaders: “The same lawmakers who preach about freedom and limited government,” he wrote, “are now legislating what we must hang on our classroom walls... But faith loses its power when it’s forced. True belief comes from conviction, not compulsion… Texas prides itself in independence, yet this law enforces conformity.”

The Christian Nationalist autocrats are not only trying to turn public classrooms into their exclusive pulpits, but to establish their repressive theology as America’s official religion. As Sharda warns, “Texas should stop confusing religion with righteousness – before the wall between church and state becomes just another thing we’ve torn down.”

Do something!

To work on the fight to keep church and state actually separate, check out the Freedom from Religion Foundation at ffrf.org.

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A headline on a recent news article caught my eye, for it declared, “Americans Disagree on Everything.”

I said to myself: “I disagree with that!”

Indeed, the untold story of today’s America is the good news that We the People fundamentally agree on more than what supposedly separates us. It is true that our daily media feed does relentlessly push political negativity and discord, and it’s true that hyper-partisan politicians grab attention by hammering their narrow views into swords of hatred. But that’s them, not the greater us.

Even hot-button issues which dominate the Internet and talk-shows are actually not all that divisive for the majority of us. For example, nearly 90 percent of Americans (including two-thirds of Republicans) oppose the right-wing attempt to whitewash our nation’s history by restricting teachers, museums etc. from addressing such realities as slavery.

More significantly, consider the real needs of ordinary workaday families. Basics like living wages, protecting Social Security, busting-up monopolies, cleaning up pollution, providing affordable housing, funding our parks and libraries, stopping price gouging. Overwhelmingly, Americans in red, blue, and purple areas agree on what government ought to be doing – and disagrees with what it is doing. But the plutocratic moneyed elites that now fund and perpetuate Americas corrupt and dysfunctional government profit by promoting hatreds to pit us against each other, praying that all of us don’t focus on them.

Don’t succumb to their self-serving lies, but seek ways to unite in what we Americans do agree on – specifically our historic commitment to the democratic values of economic fairness, social justice, and equal treatment for all. Anything less is BS.

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Texas: What the Hell? The Lone Star State’s government, a wholly-owned corporate subsidiary, solidified its ranking this year as America’s #1 innovator of really bad public policies.

Branching out from their usual corrupt collusion with Big Oil, industrial polluters, and other profiteering hucksters, the governor and top lawmakers came up with a whole new batch of legalized slick-um, specifically to protect and profit a new Texas stock market for big money dealers. Who needs it? After all, beaucoup markets already exist for speculators and such. Yes – but those markets are at least loosely regulated to protect investors – plus, some states want to tax stock-trading profits.

So here come Texas politicos, pushing a cutely-named “Y’all Street” stock exchange, promising that it’ll be “speculator friendly.” Friendly means limp regulation, little public disclosure of schemes, and hostility to taxation.

For example, to spare rich stock profiteers from paying their share of taxes (like working stiffs do), Republican leaders have graciously acted to prevent state taxation on the massive profits speculators get from selling stocks, bonds, real estate, etc. And, to prove their undying plutocratic love for the rich, lawmakers plan to engrave this special tax break in the Texas Constitution, effectively closing off rich people’s ill-gotten gains as a source of revenue for the state’s future needs.

This Lone Star stock market is a cynical big-government scam to further enrich the privileged few hoping to shift the cost of basic public services away from those most able to pay onto the backs of workaday families. If you wonder how inequality happens, study the Texas example. And hurry – the right-wing intends to bring it to your state next.

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Roaring 20s novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”

Well, yes… they’re rich!

But maybe you’re doing pretty well these days, counting yourself among the rich. That’s charming, but let’s check the latest wealth indicator: Do you have a “private concierge?” You might live in a megahouse, have a maid and a nanny, travel First Class – but having a private concierge is what separates you commonplace millionaires from the filthy rich.

What do these personal servants actually do? “We fix problems,” says one owner of a boutique firm that offers “hyper-personalization” services to select clients worldwide. Want to get a table tonight at a fully-booked restaurant in Paris? Don’t call the restaurant – call your fixer, gets it done. If you’re going to a formal ceremony in Hong Kong but – OMG you left your tuxedo back home in Oshkosh. Your concierge will find a courier to deliver it on time.

In addition to dealing with such upper-class urgencies, these “lifestyle managers” also relieve the überrich of having to cope with everyday details of real life. No need to call a plumber, plan a birthday party, shop for basics, and such – that’s why you pay about $75,000 a year to have your own handler. They’ve become such a must-have emblem of luxury that even Chase Bank and American Express now offer concierges to their high-end clients.

What’s at work here is a decadent ethic of royal entitlement. It’s a grandiose (and socially-destructive) assumption of superiority by the filthy rich – who misinterpret their wealth as worthiness. Oh, and we common taxpayers get to subsidize these personal concierges.

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