Generations of working class shrimpers, oysterers, and other fishing families on the sparkling bays along the Texas coastline of the Gulf of Mexico, have long shared the waterways with alligators and snakes that also call this place home.

But in the 1980s, a strange and invasive new critter entered Lavaca Bay, and it’s been devouring whole species of seafood, along with the livelihoods of local Gulf communities. This was not some monster from the deep, but a massive, 45,000-acre factory owned by Formosa Plastics Corporation, founded by the richest man in Taiwan.

Formosa is not here for seafood. It’s the world’s second largest fabricator of polyvinyl chloride, the tiny, highly-toxic pebbles and powders used to make gabillions of plastic bags, pipes, bottles, etc. For decades, Formosa has cavalierly been dumping trillions of these poisonous pebbles and tons of the polyvinyl powders into its wastewater – which end up in Lavaca Bay.

That poisonous content then spreads to other bays and into the shrimp, oysters, fish, and other creatures living there. The result has been species vanishing from these waters, creating economic and social devastation for families and communities that rely on nature’s bounty.

Wait, isn’t this against the law? Of course – but petrochemical behemoths like Formosa have corrupted the law, turning Texas lawmakers and environmental regulators into their puppets. But, when leaders won’t lead, The People must, and that’s exactly what’s happening in this case. A defiant, determined shrimper and a scrappy environmental coalition have combined to win the largest citizen environmental lawsuit in US history, forcing Formosa to stop its gross contamination.

For information on the details and impact of this remarkable people’s victory, go to Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid at TLRA.org.

We might expect that corporate billionaires and Koch-funded Republican right-wingers would be howl-at-the-moon opponents of a wealth tax, Medicare-for-All, and other big, progressive ideas to help improve the circumstances of America’s workaday majority. But… Democrats?

Unfortunately, yes. Not grassroots Dems, but a gaggle of don’t-rock-the-corporate-boat, Fraidy-cat Democrats. These naysayers are the Party’s old-line pols, lobbyists, and other insider elites who’re now screeching that Democratic candidates must back off those big proposals. Why? Because, they squawk, being so bold, so progressive, so – well, so Democratic – will scare voters. As one meekly put it: “When you say Medicare for All, it’s a risk. It makes people afraid.”

Excuse me, but in my speeches and writings I say “Medicare for All” a lot – and far from cowering, people stand up and cheer! In fact, the New York Times has just reported that 81 percent of Democrats (and two-thirds of independents) support Medicare for All. Even apple pie doesn’t score that high! It’s simply a lie that the people are “afraid” of the idea of everyone getting public-financed health care.

So who really fears it? Three special-interest groups: Insurance company profiteers, Big Pharma price gougers – and the political insiders who’re hooked on funding from those corporations.

Not only is it a pusillanimous fabrication to claim that the people oppose any changes stronger than corporate minimalism, it’s also political folly. If the Democratic Party won’t stand up for the transformative structural changes that America’s middle and low-income majority clearly wants and needs, why would those people stand up for Democrats? As the 2016 presidential election taught us so painfully, a whole lot of the working class Democrats the Party counts on… won’t.

“‘It’s a Risk’: Democratic Leaders Warn That ‘Medicare for All’ May Backfire,” The New York Times, November 27, 2019.

“The Heart of the Matter in the Democratic Debate,” Medium.com, November 18, 2019.

“Biden overstates ‘Medicare for All’ opposition,” Austin American Statesman, December 2, 2019.

“Voters Back Warren Plan To Tax Rich, Poll Shows,” The New York Times, December 2, 2019.

There’s a new political army on the march in America: Tromp-tromp-tromp they came, it’s the Billionaire Brigade!

It’s actually a very small army – only 749 Americans rank as billionaires. But they have a lot of firepower – collectively, they’ve amassed some $4-trillion in personal wealth and are now grabbing nearly all of the new wealth that our economy generates. In response to the extreme inequality their greed has created, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other Democratic leaders are proposing a widely-popular wealth tax on the opulence of this tiny group. And oh, what wails of anguish this has generated in the lairs of billionaires! They’re indignant that fortunes above $50-million would be assessed a teeny surtax to help fund education, health care, infrastructure, and America’s other essential needs.

So, with a rallying cry of Save the Poor Rich, the Billionaire’s Brigade seeks your pity: Mark Zuckerberg laments that taxing his gabillions would hurt charities; Michael Bloomberg suggests that the tax could turn America into Venezuela; and Wall Street baron Leon Cooperman actually teared up while wailing that a wealth tax would harm his family. As one money manager said, “These tax proposals are scaring the bejeezus out of people who have accumulated a lot of wealth.”

I don’t think there’s much Jesus in these people! The Biblical Jesus would bless Sanders, Warren, and the majority of Americans who favor a wealth tax to benefit the Common Good. No need to cry for the few hundred haughty families whose love of money would be only slightly dinged by this tax – every one of them would still be fabulously rich. Plus, they’ll be privileged to live in a country that’s a little more closely aligned with its people’s egalitarian values. And that’s priceless.

“America’s billionaires take center stage in national politics, colliding with populist Democrats,” The Washington Post, November 9, 2019.

Breaking news: Donald Trump has inadvertently said something true!

He recently exulted that his special tax incentives to spur investment in poverty projects have gone “beyond anything that anybody… even thought.” So true! His “Opportunity Zone” tax breaks are financing such “anti-poverty” projects as a Superyacht Marina on the toney waterfront of West Palm Beach, Florida. Who would’ve thought?

Named Rybovich, this project is a “luxurious resort-style” marina that will accommodate the $100-million, football-field-sized yachts of the super-rich. Not your typical poverty zone. It’s being developed by Wayne Huizenga Jr. – the politically-connected billionaire who inherited a fortune last year from his father, a corporate baron who had owned Blockbuster Video and was a major donor and plutocratic pal of Donald Trump. Father and son were also big money backers of Rick Scott, the notoriously sleazy Republican governor of Florida, who had authority under Trump’s Opportunity Zone program to designate which poverty areas were eligible for the multimillion-dollar tax subsidies. Obviously, an opulent superyacht marina does not qualify.

But… money talks. Huizenga Jr. simply asked his buddy the governor to give the tax break to him, and – shazam! – Scott waved his magic gubernatorial wand and transformed the posh marina into a poverty zone – an area in which Huizenga himself had just bought a $5 million house. The tax subsidy he’s been given could cover the cost of that house – but we won’t know, since Trump’s law requires no disclosure of who gets how much of a tax handout.

Even more disgusting is that, since the law limits the number of Opportunity Zone projects, slipping in the Huizenga’s luxury Marina meant that an actual poverty-stricken area in Florida got rejected by the governor. Plutocracy in Action.

“A Trump Tax Break To Help The Poor Went To a Rich GOP Donor’s Superyacht Marina,” ProPublica, November 14, 2019.

Years ago, a Texas legislator who was known to be bribable explained his ethical framework as opportunistic: “I seen my chances, and I took ’em,” he said.

Likewise, such hustlers as Dan Gilbert (the billionaire founder of Quicken Loans), Michael Milken (the disgraced Wall Street finagler), and Stephen Ross (the owner of the Miami Dolphins) have seen opportunistic chances in Donald Trump’s program of “Opportunity Zone” tax breaks – and grabbed them. The new law was trumpeted as a channel for funneling new investments into poor communities, but billionaires have jumped on it like chickens on a cricket, devouring the poor people’s tax subsidy to underwrite their own luxury projects.

Consider Kevin Plank’s scam in Baltimore. The billionaire owner of the sports apparel outfit named Under Armour, he wanted to use the subsidy for an upscale project called Port Covington. But, alas, Plank’s section of land was not in a low-income zone, so it didn’t qualify. But – Eureka! – the billionaire found a loophole: If a piece of property was within an old “empowerment zone,” it could get the subsidy. Alas again, though, Port Covington was not inside the qualifying zone, but next to it. However, an old mapping mistake showed that a tiny slice of Plank’s property line ran under a highway overpass, just inside the zone. Based on the map’s error, Maryland Governor Larry Hogan and Trump’s Treasury Department quickly certified every inch of the Port Covington tract as an Opportunity Zone eligible for the full poverty subsidy.

And that’s how corporate and political elites conspire to rig the system, blatantly ripping off poverty money to make the rich richer and increase inequality in America.

Sen. Ron Wyden has introduced an “Opportunity Zone Reform Act” to stop this immoral scam. For more information go to Finance.Senate.gov.

“A Trump Tax Break To Help The Poor Went To a Rich GOP Donor’s Superyacht Marina,” ProPublica, November 14, 2019.

“Billionaires Keep Benefiting From a Tax Break to Help the Poor. Now, Congress Wants to Investigate.” ProPublica, November 8, 2019.

“One Trump Tax Cut Was Meant to Help the Poor. A Billionaire Ended Up Winning Big.” ProPublica, June 19, 2019.

America certainly has an abundance of food (even though many Americans do not), yet we face a momentous choice of whether to pursue a food future rooted in the ethic of sustainable agriCULTURE – or one based on the exploitative ethic of agriINDUSTRY.

What better symbol of agri-industry’s vision of “food” than that ubiquitous Thanksgiving bird, the “Butterball” turkey. The Butterball has been hoisted onto our tables by huge advertising budgets and regular promotion payments to supermarkets. The birds themselves have been grotesquely deformed by industrial geneticists, who created breasts so ponderous that the turkeys can’t walk, stand up, or even reproduce on their own (thus earning the nickname “dead-end birds’). Adding torture to this intentional deformity, the industry sentences these once-majestic fowl to dismal lives in tiny confinement cages inside the sprawling, steel-and-concrete animal factories that scar America’s rural landscape – monuments to greed-based corporate “husbandry.”

As the eminent farmer-poet-activist Wendell Berry tells us, eating is a profound political act. It lets you and me vote for the Butterball industrial model or choose to go back to the future of agriculture, which is the art and science of cooperating with, rather than trying to overwhelm, nature. That cooperative ethic is the choice of the remarkable “Good Food Uprising” that has spread across the country in the past 30 years. Now the fastest-growing segment of the food economy, it is creating the alternative model of a local, sustainable, small scale, community-based, organic, humane, healthy, democratic – and tasty! – food system for all.

To take part in the good food movement and find small-scale farmers, artisans, farmers markets, and other resources in your area, visit www.LocalHarvest.org.

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.