For more than 30 years, our state Democratic Party has relied on high-dollar donors and high-dollar consultants to “win Texas.”

It’s time to face up to the obvious: We haven’t. In fact, we’ve lost whole areas and communities that we grassroots Democrats used to win again and again. So here’s a thought: Let’s take our Party back to the grassroots!

· REFOCUS on year-round outreach to local people and community networks that are our natural strength.

· REINVEST in grassroots organizing and party-building all across Texas, including in long-abandoned rural areas.

· REINVIGORATE and REACTIVATE “little-d” democrats by delivering a clear “on your side” message of progressive populism, taking on the GOP plutocrats and billionaire oligarchs.

The time to start reempowering a winning grassroots party is now—by choosing Kendall Scudder to be our Chair of the Texas Democratic Party. He has the know-how, the working-class passion, and even the money-raising ability to rally and organize us at the ground level (the human level of politics) to restore democratic values and policies in our state.

I hope you’ll join in this effort so we Democrats can really start to “win Texas” for the workaday people of our state.

Find out more about Kendall at www.kendallscudder.com.

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It’s been my honor to know a few real heroes – people who’ve selflessly dared to fight greed and oppression to advance the common good. Diane Wilson, for example.

For forty years, this fiery, fourth-generation fisherwoman from the Texas Gulf Coast has battled tenaciously for the rights and very survival of the area’s hardscrabble fishing families. She and her grassroots allies have taken on Formosa Plastics, a $250 billion, global corporate beast that has routinely dumped its chemical waste around Matagorda Bay, poisoning life and livelihoods.

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But in 2019, in a lawsuit based on massive evidence collected by Wilson and her armada of volunteer kayakers, she won a stunning court victory, forcing the contaminator to pay $50 million for its malfeasance.

Wilson’s fight was not just for her, and she did not get a penny from the Formosa settlement. But she won something richer than money – “It felt like justice,” she said of the court’s judgement.

Importantly, the court didn’t award the $50 million to some regulatory agency, but to a public trust administered by – guess who? – Wilson’s allies! So she has been working tenaciously ever since to make sure the money directly benefits the poor families Formosa ran over. Especially promising is the trust’s major grant to create the people’s own Matagorda Bay Fishing Cooperative. It will provide dock space, supply contracts, processing ability, local jobs… and the power for local people to forge their own future.

Why fight against overpowering odds for 40 years? Because of her strong principles… and sheer stubbornness. “It’s my home,” Wilson says of the bay and its working-class community, “and I completely refuse to give it to that company to ruin.”

Learn more about Diane and support her work:

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

It’s been my honor to know a few real heroes – people who’ve selflessly dared to fight greed and oppression to advance the common good. Diane Wilson, for example.

For forty years, this fiery, fourth-generation fisherwoman from the Texas Gulf Coast has battled tenaciously for the rights and very survival of the area’s hardscrabble fishing families. She and her grassroots allies have taken on Formosa Plastics, a $250 billion, global corporate beast that has routinely dumped its chemical waste around Matagorda Bay, poisoning life and livelihoods.

But in 2019, in a lawsuit based on massive evidence collected by Wilson and her armada of volunteer kayakers, she won a stunning court victory, forcing the contaminator to pay $50 million for its malfeasance.

Wilson’s fight was not just for her, and she did not get a penny from the Formosa settlement. But she won something richer than money – “It felt like justice,” she said of the court’s judgement.

Importantly, the court didn’t award the $50 million to some regulatory agency, but to a public trust administered by – guess who? – Wilson’s allies! So she has been working tenaciously ever since to make sure the money directly benefits the poor families Formosa ran over. Especially promising is the trust’s major grant to create the people’s own Matagorda Bay Fishing Cooperative. It will provide dock space, supply contracts, processing ability, local jobs… and the power for local people to forge their own future.

Why fight against overpowering odds for 40 years? Because of her strong principles… and sheer stubbornness. “It’s my home,” Wilson says of the bay and its working-class community, “and I completely refuse to give it to that company to ruin.”

Learn more about Diane and support her work:

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

A lot of working-class voters, who live outside of blue voting areas are asking: Where the hell is the Democratic party?

Sad to say, the “Party of the People” is mired in Washington, controlled by a cadre of high-dollar consultants, corporate lobbyists, big donors, and meek political leaders who’ve decide that “red” and rural American voters are lost causes. But grassroots progressives who live in those areas say: Bovine excrement! After all, you damn sure can’t win if you don’t bother to show up.

So, party inertia aside, progressive advocates for working class values, policies, and people must become the ground-level organizers to build a “little-d” democratic majority. Not by writing position papers, but by “going there” in-person, online, or otherwise. Let’s tap grassroots savvy to find ways to reach and move millions of people (just a few at a time) who’re now not being reached or motivated.

Who will do this? Maybe you! Or someone you know: People (young or old) with talent-skills-ideas that are now not being fully used should consider this chance to make a difference. George Goehl, one of our nation’s best organizers of community organizers recently issued an Open Call for creative dedicated people to do new working-class organizing all across our country.

Don’t know how? It basically involves learning to listen to local people. Goehl, with his team of seasoned organizers, will train and provide essential support for people whose organizing ideas are accepted. Happily, project positions come with a full-time salary, benefits, and a start-up budget. The whole idea is to try new things, invest in what works… and win!

Want to throw you hat and ideas into the mix? No charge to apply. You can fill out an application at georgegoehl.substack.com.

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

Cecile Richards--what a sparkling gem of a human!

It was my joy and good luck to know her from the 1980s, when I was running for Texas Agriculture Commissioner and her mother, Ann, was running for State Treasurer. Young Cecile was Ann's secret weapon, both a passionate surrogate campaigner and a compassionate advocate for workday people who're routinely overlooked by the political system.

We wanted her to run for high office, but she was too busy representing common people and standing for the Common Good to let a political career interfere. And she not only brought her smarts to every effort, but also her genuine, uplifting laughter that made people want to be part of whatever outrage she was battling.

If you're looking for a role model for a worthy life in public service, think Cecile.

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This week, we thought we’d share with you one of our favorite classic Lowdown issues from December 2021, on the increasingly tough time political cartoonists are having with the state of news. Enjoy!

As a tyke, I never dreamed of growing up to be a political activist/ commentator, but here I am, and it's worked out pretty well for me. I've been lucky enough to have a voice in public matters and eke out a modest living running my mouth as an independent populist agitator. Still, I have to confess to the sin of Job Envy. Not in the sense of being resentful, but regretful about my own inability to lift the trade of journalistic commentary to the heights attained by a small, feisty collection of unique public opinionators: Political cartoonists.

One thing you can say about Trump is that he’s absolutely clear on his furious opposition to immigrants taking American jobs.

Except, of course, when the corporate honchos profiting from cheap immigrant labor are billionaire funders of Trump’s campaigns – or, hello, when Trump himself is doing the hiring!

A work-permit program called H-1B actually allows corporate giants to import foreigners to take US jobs. Trump loudly denounced this in his first term, but that was pre-Elon. When gabillionaire Elon Musk became Donald’s campaign Sugar Daddy last year, he turned out to be a mass abuser of the H-1B loophole – apparently even firing workers in his Tesla corporation and replacing them with cheaper foreign imports.

Yet, far from scolding his new Best Buddy, Trump did a full-body flip-flop. Now hailing H-1B as “a great program,” he admits that he, too, has long used it, even when he was denouncing it as a shameful rip-off of American workers.

Trump’s use of the foreign hire scheme is even chintzier than Musk’s for he uses a companion H-2 loophole to import hundreds of low-paid foreigners to take jobs as cooks, waiters, housekeepers, and farmworkers in his luxury resorts and hotels – including at Mar-a-Lago.

Amazing. These are lordly billionaires reducing themselves to sleaze by exploiting a corporate scheme to shortchange American and foreign workers alike. Moreover, whether trying to import engineers or waiters, the law requires these über-rich applicants to lie. They must swear that there are no American citizens available who can do these jobs.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Welcome to Don and Elon’s phantasmagoric wonderland, where nothing is a lie if they say it’s true.

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The sorry state of corporate journalism sagged to an even lower low this month when the Washington Post banned publication of a piece by its own Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, Ann Telnaes.

Why cancel her drawing? Because it lampooned Jeff Bezos, the multibillionaire boss of Amazon – who also happens to own The Post. The cartoon depicts Bezos and other media titans (even Mickey Mouse!) groveling at the feet of Donald Trump and offering sacks of cash. She was mocking Bezos and the others for recently sucking up to The Don by giving a million dollars each in celebration of his election.

Top Post executives not only abandoned the paper’s journalistic integrity by censoring its prized cartoonist, but they then tried to cover-up their suppression by calling it a technicality. “We had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon,” weaseled a top manager, claiming he cut Telnaes’s drawing merely to avoid “repetition.”

But hello, read any paper, watch Fox News, listen to talk radio – and you’ll see that mass media relies on repetition. Moreover, cartoonists don’t merely repeat a story, they add journalistic impact by literally drawing a picture of it!

Ann Telnaes resigned on principle over this affront. Imagine Billionaire Bezos acting on any principle (besides advancing his financial principal). Yet, solely because he’s rich, he can compel a paper once renown for political courage to conform to the current plutocratic order. That’s how journalism dies. Democracy, too.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Yet, genuine journalism and democracy itself remain resilient, specifically because scrappy champions like Ann Telnaes – armed with integrity and a sharp pen – don’t quit. She’s still cartooning. Find her at anntelnaes.substack.com.

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

As a writer, I get stuck every so often straining for the right words to tell my story. Over the years, though, I’ve learned when to quit tying myself into mental knots over sentence construction, instead stepping back and rethinking where my story is going.

This process is essentially what millions of American working families are going through this year as record numbers of them are shocking bosses, politicians, and economists by stepping back and declaring: “We quit!” Most of the quits are tied to very real abuses that have become ingrained in our workplaces over the past couple of decades – poverty paychecks, no health care, unpredictable schedules, no child care, understaffing, forced overtime, unsafe jobs, sexist and racist managers, tolerance of aggressively-rude customers, and so awful much more.

Specific grievances abound, but at the core of each is a deep, inherently-destructive executive-suite malignancy: Disrespect. The corporate system has cheapened employees from valuable human assets worthy of being nurtured and advanced to a bookkeeping expense that must be steadily eliminated. It’s not just about paychecks, it’s about feeling valued, feeling that the hierarchy gives a damn about the people doing the work.

Yet, corporate America is going out of its way to show that it doesn’t care – and, of course, workers notice. So, unionization is booming, millions who were laid off by the pandemic are refusing to rush back to the same old grind, and now millions who have jobs are quitting. This is much more than an unusual unemployment stat – it’s a sea change in people’s attitude about work itself… and life.

Bonus: one of our favorite memes from the last few years. More info from Snopes.

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You’re not fooling me, Jimmy Carter. You did that on purpose! Dying when you did, I mean.

You chose last month to grab the global political spotlight once more to make a statement with the only Earthly move you had left: Checking out. What better way to make people ponder the state of political integrity in America than to reflect on Carter just the Trump Kakistocracy is moving its arrogant billionaires, corporate grifters, and ideological tyrants into our White House.

Sure enough, media coverage of Carter’s death highlighted his modest life in Plains, Georgia, plus the personal values of fairness and honesty that led him to a lifetime of roll-up-your-sleeves humanitarian efforts. What a damning contrast to the tawdry greedfest on display at Mar-a-Lago, with supposedly-respectable corporate executives flocking to “get theirs” in Trump’s sell-off of government favors and public offices.

And how amazed Carter must have been to see the gilded Trumpers flagrantly rejecting any pretense that theirs is to be a government of and for The People. He even saw Elon Musk – the prancing prince of plutocratic pomosity – practically move into Trump’s Florida mansion to shape the new government. To put a gloss of legitimacy on Elon’s self-serving role, Trump grandly named him head of an imaginary federal office he calls the “Department of Government Efficiency.” This DOGE should be pronounced “dodgy,” for it doesn’t actually exist and has no authority. But Musk is nonetheless flitting about officiously announcing that he will eliminate major programs that benefit people, while increasing government funding for – surprise! – corporations like his.

Even in death, the light of Jimmy Carter’s public integrity exposes the public corruption coming from Trump’s darkness.

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