All across the country, nonprofit hospital chains are literally upping their game.

These corporate entities receive special tax exemptions because they provide some free and reduced-cost medical services to poor families. But, as one CEO put it, many chains are now going the extra yard to serve local folks “in new and exciting ways.”

Great! Our whole health system desperately needs better quality, more-affordable care for all!

Uh… no… that’s not what they mean.

Rather, the exciting new thing being pushed by non-profit hospitals is to spend big chunks of their tax-free revenue on their area’s professional and college sports teams. For what? Get this: To buy the naming rights to the teams’ stadiums and ballparks! A children’s hospital in Fresno, California, for example, has put down $10 million to slap its name on Fresno State University’s football stadium. And a Tennessee “safety-net” hospital has committed millions to emblazon its corporate name on the ballpark of Chattanooga’s pro-baseball franchise.

Sweet Jesus, what the hell? One university marketing professor even tried to rationalize these diabolical, high-dollar transactions by comparing them to community-spirited doctors buying jerseys for a town’s Little League team! Excuse me, but this is a big-league perversion of the healthcare mission. Indeed, the Fresno State deal included special perks for the hospital’s top honchos – including a skybox suite at FSU games, food & drink for them, seats on the team’s charter plane, and a bundle of free tickets to home games.

This is Jim Hightower saying… As the Republican mayor of Chattanooga gently noted: “At a time of severe nursing shortages and quality of care concerns, this decision is hard to explain.”

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My life goals have never included making a lot of money… and I’ve certainly succeeded in that regard.

Yet, I do consider myself rich. Not like the Wall Street “richie-rich,” but in the modest sense of middle-class well-being – basically, enough to make ends meet. It’s not my good looks that puts me in this lucky zone, but one particular public asset that has long been serving the common good for decades, lifting millions of workaday Americans to some decent level of shared prosperity: Social Security.

Plutocratic elites and their political puppets constantly wail that it’s a socialist scam, a wasteful giveaway to old people. But regular folks know that’s hokum, since nearly all of us pay into the plan every month of our working lives. In short, it’s our money!

Moreover, each of our Social Security accounts steadily build up. So, consider this: The most valuable financial asset for 9 out of 10 American families, is not their houses or Aunt Tillie’s will – but their Social Security holdings. Even for rock-solid, middle-class families, Social Security provides for about a third of their total lifetime wealth.

This is Jim Hightower saying… When right-wingers screech that “fiscal prudence” demands they slash the program’s benefits, that’s bank-robber code for looting wealth you’ve banked for years in this People’s retirement system. Plus, there is absolutely no excuse for such thievery, since an honest, fair, and simple adjustment would keep the program fully funded in perpetuity: Rather than letting gabillionaires like Elon Musk put practically none of their massive incomes into this egalitarian effort to provide a decent retirement for all, make them pay Social Security taxes exactly like regular workers do.

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In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Humpty Dumpty scornfully declares that, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean.”

So what does “woke” mean? It’s become the pet political aspersion that today’s kooky right-wing hucksters hurl at liberals, but the hurlers would be whopperjawed to learn that it’s was actually coined by and for progressives! Indeed, it admonishes people to be awake to the dangers posed by hate-filled bigots and reactionaries like… well, like today’s right-wing extremists.

SURPRISING HISTORICAL TIDBIT: The first person reported to have used the word was Huddie Ledbetter, the legendary Black blues artist known as Lead Belly. Among his many classic songs was “Scottsboro Boys,” about nine Black teenagers falsely accused in 1931 of raping two Alabama white women. As a Black musician who traveled the backroads of the Jim Crow South, Lead Belly warned others to pay attention when in a viciously racist state: “Best stay woke,” he cautioned.

But—out of blind ignorance, blind arrogance, or both—today’s adaptors of the Jim Crow mentality have perverted common-sense wokeness into a verbal whip to lash African-Americans, immigrants, Democrats, women, LGBTQ+ people and all others they don’t like (pretty much everyone who looks, thinks, prays and acts different from them). How kooky? They’ve declared librarians, science, Mickey Mouse, and Bud Light to be their evil enemies. “Don’t be woke,” they bark, demanding autocratic, plutocratic, and theocratic laws to coerce compliance with their own retrogressive bigotries.

This is Jim Hightower saying… Bear in mind that this is no longer a fringe cult, but the mainstream of the Republican Party, including its top congressional leaders, presidential wannabes, and state officials. Actually, you can easily comprehend what these Humpty-Dumpties really mean by their “Don’t Be Woke” war cry. Just substitute the word “sane” for “woke.”

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Nearly all Americans agree that Congress has become a sad joke – a blight of irritating gnats.

How exciting, then, that a consultant to top Republican lawmakers has figured out how to make Congress better. Ready? Raise the members’ pay!

Golly, why didn’t I think of that? After all, who wants to work for only $174,000 a year (plus full health care, a really nice lifetime pension, and a flock of personal staffers to do the heavy lifting)? This congressional insider insists that such compensation is way too paltry for the best-and-brightest types Congress needs, so they choose Wall Street or corporate careers, rather than public service.

“Ask any corporate leader,” he asserts, and they’ll say “talent is everything.” And, he explains, it takes serious bucks to “attract and retain talent.” So, the answer to getting a better Congress is easy, he writes: “Let’s start by doubling their salaries.”

Excuse me, but let’s not.

While money is the reason Congress fails to represent the common good of America’s workday majority, their paychecks aren’t to blame. Rather, it’s the corrupting power of the unlimited dollars that corporations and billionaires are spewing into our elections and lobbying campaigns, literally buying the special-interest Congress that Americans despise.

The obvious problem with Congress is not that members don’t get enough money, but that they take too much. Don’t even think about raising congressional pay before outlawing congressional payoffs! Besides, anyone who’ll only commit to public service work if their pay is doubled is not committed to the public, to service, or even to work. They’re narcissists, committed to themselves – and Congress already has an excess of those.

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Some days I don’t know whether to rage in fury, weep quietly, or just throw up.

This, however, is definitely a throw-up day. That’s because our US Secretary of State (a once-honorable position that advocated humanitarian values) has just decreed that war-torn Palestinian children from Gaza will be denied medical visas that would let them come here for life-saving surgeries. Yes, innocent children horribly maimed by the US bombs, bullets, and billions of our tax dollars that our government sends to prop up the corrupt Israeli regime of Netanyahu, have now had America’s door slammed in their faces by Trump’s nutball extremists.

How extreme? Even bulldog right-winger Marjorie Taylor Greene is appalled that top USA officials have turned so cold as to reject common decency for “Palestinian kids who had their limbs and bodies blown apart.” But Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who reportedly once had a smidgeon of political integrity, immediately snapped to attention when someone named Laura Loomer – one of Trump’s loopy “influencers” – proclaimed that these Palestinian medical seekers were “pro-Hamas.”

Hello… they’re children! To which the Loomer lady summoned this piece of ignorance from deep within her dark soul: “They are not that sick if they can sit on a plane for 22 hours to get to America.”

Okay, she’s just a doofus, but Rubio? He’s a practicing Catholic, so he surely knows Jesus’ biblical admonition: “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” Yet, he has officially banned them from the compassionate arms of the American people, darkly warning: “It’s not just kids… a bunch of adults are accompanying them.”

Yeah – their parents, guardians, good Samaritans. Gotta watch out for those types.

To stay on top of everything happening to Gaza, and to find solid actions you can take to fight and end the genocide, we recommend following Linda Sarsour, a Palestinian-American organizer and strategist who was also a surrogate for Bernie Sanders during his 2016 campaign.

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Bobby Kennedy, Jr. seemed on the right track when he launched his “Make America Healthy Again” campaign.

Well, not the wacky-quacky part of that agenda, where he teeters off into the prickly thicket of medical voodoo and vaccine bugaboos. But he was onto something fundamentally important when he began to rally public opposition to the arrogance, greed, and willful destructiveness of pesticide peddlers and other Big Food profiteers.

As Secretary of Health, Kennedy pushed Trump’s “presidential commission on children’s health” to take long-overdue action to rein-in those agribusiness contaminators of our food supply and natural resources. He called for limits and outright bans on industrial ag and food processing abuses that grow corporate profits at the expense of healthy kids.

Great!

But wait – the commission’s draft report is now out, and none of Kennedy’s most meaningful stuff is in it. None! There’s no suggestion, for example, that even the most toxic cancer-causing pesticides should be outlawed, permanently removed from food products and our environment.

What happened? Money. While Kennedy was publicly talking a good game, Big Food profiteers were paying a million dollars each to have intimate talks at private dinners with Trump. And when money talks, political integrity walks.

Sadly, rather than resigning in protest of Trump’s whitewash and rallying America’s families to carry this betrayal into next year’s elections, Kennedy is hyping the report’s empty calories as a people’s victory! But he can’t make chicken salad out of chicken manure. Grassroots groups themselves call the gutted report “beyond laughable,” “profoundly disappointing” and “dangerous.”

For genuine, structural change in food policy, go to Environmental Working Group: ewg.org.

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At about 12 years of age, I began working for my father, loading bundles into the two delivery trucks used in his small business. This required that, first, I back the trucks down an alley and into the loading bay. Thus, I learned to drive going backward, which probably says something fundamental about me.

But even at 12, I didn’t get stuck in reverse, as today’s Republican Congress has. The GOP’s autocratic ideologues and corporate toadies are spurning hard-won, economic, social, environmental, and other progress made by generations of grassroots Americans. They are trying to drive our people back to Robber Baron rule and Jim Crow law.

Indeed, no progressive advance today escapes the wrath of the GOP’s ideological swat squad. Consider the operatic political frenzy they’re now stirring up over Post Office trucks. Yes, that ubiquitous fleet of red, white, and blue mail delivery vehicles you see on every street and rural road in America.

Those gas-powered workhorses, now 35 years old, are way overdue for replacement. Sensibly, the Postal Service is buying fuel-efficient, non-polluting, electric vehicles, which include such basics as airbags and air conditioning.

But no, squealed extreme right-wingers like Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa. She condemns the very idea of a battery-powered fleet as lefty “wokeness.” So she’s demanding that Congress literally defund the purchase of EVs, forcing the Postal Service to go backward to inefficient, polluting trucks fueled by Big Oil – an industry that just happens to be a generous funder of her career.

To get a clear-eyed view of which are the best vehicles to take us way forward, don’t ask a corporate-owned ideologue; ask the postal workers who drive them. Go to apwu.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.

In a 2006 documentary, I assailed Texas Republican lawmakers for ramming a brutish gerrymandering scheme into law, doing my report from a street sign in central Austin.

That sign was the exact location the GOP had used as the pin point for slicing up the city’s one congressional district into four pieces like a pizza. Each slice radiated far out of town, merging into Republican suburbs in distant cities – thus suppressing Austin’s progressive voice in Congress.

Now here they come again, assaulting progressive voters throughout the state with a gerrymandering gang bang. At the command of Donald Trump, our so-called “representatives” are submissively shoving millions of Texans into jerry-rigged Trump enclaves, solely to serve his political desires.

Far from being just another corrupt hyper-partisan political manipulation, this GOP ploy is stripping away America’s fundamental principle of representative democracy. Instead of grassroots communities sorting out their differences and choosing their own governing representatives in local elections, political hacks in Washington and the state capital are cynically relocating people’s political “locality” (with no participation at all by the people).

Yes, instead of constituents choosing their members of Congress, gerrymandering lets members choose their constituents. So “your” representative doesn’t need to know you, much less serve you. Thus, the issues that Congress considers don’t percolate up from local communities, but are chosen by national and state political operatives and multimillion-dollar campaign donors. It’s the nationalization of local elections, ignoring the real needs of hometown people.

Why shouldn’t you have a representative who’s at least from your community, maybe even knows your name… and gives a damn about something more constructive than Trump’s anti-democratic, plutocratic agenda.

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Is Elon Musk OK?

Just a few months ago, the prancing right-winger was constantly in the news. Today, though – poof! – he has vanished from media coverage. But fret not -- Elon always finds money to take care of Number One. Indeed, this month he was handed a $30 billion pay raise by his car company. Yes, BILLION.

Odd, since his stewardship of Tesla in the past couple of years has been disastrous. Sales, profit, quality, and market share are in the ditch, along with his own reputation. Yet, in a gushing letter to shareholders, the corporation’s board of directors asserted that its $30 billion handout was a “critical” gesture to induce Elon to show up for work. Apparently, $29 billion would not have been enough.

Who are these board members who supposedly “govern” the corporation and its CEO? One is Kimbal Musk. Yes, Elon’s brother! Others are close pals and lackeys, each of whom is extravagantly paid. For example, the board member who “negotiated” that ridiculous giveaway to His Supremeness has pocketed more than half a billion dollars in profits from Tesla stock options she has been granted.

Well, declare apologists for Musk and his captive board, if $30 billion was excessive, the shareholders who technically own Tesla could’ve sued to stop payment. Uh… no, they couldn’t. Last year, Musk moved Tesla’s official residence to Texas, where the corrupt governor dutifully passed a law dictating that only shareholders owning at least three percent of the stock can sue on matters of corporate governance. Basically, that eliminates all shareholders except: Musk.

And that’s how the corporate merry-go-round is rigged to keep spinning around and around and around.

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A gaggle of self-righteous multimillionaires are now in charge of America’s poverty agencies and policies, and they’ve been flaunting their deeply-held ignorance about poor families – almost none of whom they actually know.

Consider the national embarrassment of Brooke Rollins, a patrician ideologue, who is Trump’s plutocratic Secretary of Agriculture. Besides promoting a corporatized food and farm system, Rollins is advocating a program of back-to-the-future peonage for poor people. “We have way too many people that are taking government program that are able to work,” she snorts.

Bad grammar aside, she falsely asserts that “34 million able-bodied adults” are freeloading on public health care. They’re taking Medicaid benefits that they ought to have to “earn” by hard labor, she recently decreed. Her Dickensian solution: Put the moochers to work in the fields!

Noting that Trump’s militarized assault on immigrants has terrorized agricultural workers, thus creating a farm labor crisis, Rollins wants to hitch America’s poor families to the plow. Voilà – labor shortage solved, and the poor are forced to earn their medical care. What a brilliant leader!

Except for her rank ignorance. First, 64 percent of Medicaid recipients are already working and nearly all of the rest are retirees, unable to work, or struggling to find jobs. Second, she’s obviously unaware that agriculture is skilled work – you can’t just bus city and suburban people out to the country and say “grow stuff.”

And third, it is beyond arrogant for a rich government autocrat – who takes $220,000 a year from taxpayers, plus platinum healthcare benefits and a fat pension – to be pontificating about forcing “undeserving” poor into hot fields to produce a nice leafy salad for her lunch.

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