How can journalism help people make sense of our turbulent world if it can’t make sense of itself?

In addition to “news” (which involves reporting on real stuff), there’s now “fake news” (stuff that’s completely made up). But wait, the barons of corporate news are also adding to today’s tumultuous state of journalism by putting out “BS news” (stuff they know is untrue, but is reported because it advances their owners political agenda).

For example, the Washington Post (owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who’s a laissez-fairyland promoter of privatizing government functions) keeps publishing a load of BS to denigrate our Post Offices. In an alarmist editorial, the paper declared: “The US Postal Service continues to hemorrhage red ink.” Embracing Bezos’ privatization ideology, the editors grumped that postal unions have made our mail service outmoded and insolvent, running up “a net loss of $5.6 billion last year.”

That is pure bovine excrement – and the editors know it. In fact, thanks to innovative and efficient postal workers, the mail agency racked up a $610 million operating profit last year, and a $1.2 billion profit the year before.

The $5 billion in red-ink that the paper’s propagandists pointed to is nothing but a bookkeeping hoax created by Congress to make people believe our Post Office is a hopeless money loser that must be privatized. In 2006, Congress manufactured an artificial “loss” for the Postal Service by decreeing that it pre-fund the healthcare costs of future retirees, 75 years in advance. That includes retirees who’re not even born yet! No other agency and no corporation (including Amazon) could survive if Congress added a $5-billion-a-year fictitious loss to their books.

Yet, in a shameful piece of BS journalism, the Washington Post intentionally ignored the true story.

“The Postal Service needs more than a Band-Aid,” the Washington Post, February 13, 2017.

Often, when world powers pick fights with seemingly powerless countries, they learn that even small dogs have sharp teeth – as President Trump is finding out in his ill-fated war with Mexico.

His scheme to wall off Mexico is collapsing because most people here in the US think it’s stupid – some two-thirds of the public say they just won’t buy his $21 billion boondoggle. But Mexicans are the ones blunting Trump’s other major attack on them – an attempt to slap a 20-percent border tax on products shipped into the US.

“Nobody knows more about trade than me,” The Donald crowed during his presidential run. Narcissistic hyperbole aside, it turns out that Mexican farmers do know a lot more about corn than he does – and they know that a lot of US-Mexico trade consists of corn.

Until NAFTA, Mexico was a corn exporter. But such grain trading giants as Cargill wrote provisions into NAFTA to rig the rules to let them grab Mexico’s corn market. This drove hundreds of thousands of Mexican producers out of business and made Mexico – where corn originated – dependent on imports from the US.

But now, Mexicans are turning that imported corn into a political weapon against Trump’s trade bluster. Rather than buy from the US, they’re negotiating to import corn from Brazil, and even more significant, they’re planning to invest in their own farmers to make Mexico self-sufficient again in this important crop.

Their counter-offensive has caused apoplexy among congressional Republicans from the US corn belt. About 75 percent of Iowa’s corn, for example, goes to Mexico, and losing that market would devastate Iowa’s economy.

So the “little dog” bit Trump on the rump, and the Big Dog has now backed away from his border-tax idea – having learned that even farmers know more about trade than he does.

“Trump Is Said to Abandon Contentious Border Tax on Imports,” New York Times, April 25, 2017.

“Mexico’s Trump riposte may be to ban U.S. corn,” Austin American Statesman, April 9, 2017.

“Building a Wall Out of Sync With American Public Opinion,” Gallup, April 27, 2017.

“Would a Bigger Wall Matter?” Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2017.

Betsy DeVos and her hubby, Dick, are lucky enough to have inherited a big chunk of the multibillion-dollar fortune that Daddy DeVos amassed through his shady Amway corporation. But what they’ve done with their Amway money is certainly not the American Way.

The DeVos couple are part of the Koch brother’s coterie, pushing plutocratic policies that reject our country’s one-for-all, all-for-one egalitarianism. In particular, Ms. DeVos has spent years and millions of dollars spreading the right-wing’s ideological nonsense that our tax-dollars should even be given to private schools that exclude people of color and the poor, as well as to profiteering schools known to cheat students and taxpayers.

Bizarrely, Donald Trump chose this vehement opponent of public education to head-up the agency in charge of – guess what – public education. Rather than working to help improve our public schools, the Trump-DeVos duo wants to take $20 billion from their federal funding and give it to corporate chains.

To see the “efficiency” of this scheme, look to Arizona, where state Senate president Steve Yarborough pushed privatization into law. One of Arizona’s corporatized schools, called ACSTO, pays its executive director $125,000. His name is Steve Yarborough. ACSTO also pays millions of dollars to another for-profit corporation named HY Processing to handle administrative chores. The “Y” in HY stands for Yarborough. And ACSTO pays $52,000 a year in rent to its landlord. Yes, Steve Yarborough.

As Wall Street banksters, drug company gougers, airline fee fixers, and so many others have taught us over and over, most corporate executives are paid big bucks to take every shortcut to cheat and do whatever to squeeze out another dime in profits. Why would we entrust our school children to them?

“DeVos and Tax Credit Vouchers: Arizona Shows What Can Go Wrong,” New York Times, March 2, 2017.

“Dismal Voucher Results Surprise Researchers as DeVos Era Begins,” New York Times, February 23, 2017.

Where are Charlie and Dave, Mrs. Koch’s two mischievous boys?

The Koch brothers have stayed out of the national limelight recently but they’re still trying to supplant American democracy with their little laissez-fairyland plutocracy. In fact, in late June, they held a meeting of the Koch Boys Billionaires Club, gathering about 400 other uber-wealthy rascals to plot some political high jinks for next year’s elections.

The club meets every year at some luxury hideaway, and its attendees have to pay $100,000 each just to get in, but participants are also expected to give generously to the brothers’ goal of spending $400 million to buy a slew of congress critters, governors, and others in 2018.

This year, the group gathered in Colorado Springs at the ultra-lux Broadmoor Hotel and Resort, owned by the brother’s billionaire pal and right-wing co-conspirator, Phillip Anschutz. Among the recent political triumphs that these elites celebrated in the Broadmoor’s posh ballroom was the defeat this year of the Colorado tax hike to fix the states crumbling roads. After all, who needs adequate roads, when you can arrive in private jets? This attitude of the Koch’s privileged cohorts explains why the public is shut out of these candid sessions. A staffer for the Koch confab hailed such no-tax, no-roads, policies as a “renaissance of freedom.” For the privileged, that is – freedom to prosper at the expense of everyone else.

Indeed, their agenda includes killing such working class needs as minimum wage and Social Security and privatizing everything from health-care to public education. This self-absorbed cabal of spoiled plutocratic brats intends to abandon our nation’s core democratic principle of “We’re all in this together.” If they kill that uniting concept, they kill America itself.

“The Koch brothers plot a conservative resistance movement in Colorado Springs strategy session,” The Denver Post, June 25, 2017.

“Transportation tax hike proposal reaches end of the road in Colorado,” The Denver Post, April 25, 2017.

Wall Street analysts tell us that Amazon’s $14 billion buy-out of Whole Foods Market is not only a win-win for both of them – but also for consumers, for Amazon intends to lower the organic grocer’s prices.

Really? Yes, say the analysts, because Amazon will use its amazing computer-driven tactics to cut Whole Foods’ cost of selling groceries. But Amazon’s robotic “efficiency” is achieved by cutting people. It ruthlessly squeezes suppliers for example, demanding that they give bankrupt-level wholesale prices to the retail colossus. That means that small organic farmers and food artisans are destined to be squeezed out of Whole Foods, displaced by deep-pocket, global food makers who’re willing to cut corners on quality and the environment in order to get on Amazon’s new grocery shelves.

Next comes Whole Foods’ helpful and friendly work force. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, doesn’t views workers as assets, but as costs, so to jack-up the grocery chain’s profit he’ll cut those “costs” – aka, people. He’s already testing a store concept that has no cashiers to interfere with your shopping “experience,” using computer sensors to take your money electronically, instead of paying bothersome humans to do the job of checking you out and – God forbid – conversing with you.

Oh, another plus of connecting us to the corporate computers is that they will track and record our every move and every purchase, building a detailed personal profile on each of us in order to… well, to do what? And why?

According to the calendar, we’re living in 2017, but the Brave New Future of Amazon’s electronic, robotic Whole Foods Market tells us we’re living in the corporatized version of 1984, where the human need for jobs and personal relationships are subverted to the corporate love of automation and avaricious profits.

“Amazon-Whole Foods: A Good Deal?” The New York Times, June 26, 2017.

“Whole Foods-Amazon deal smorgasbord of possibilities,” Austin American Statesman, June 26, 2017.

Excellent news, folks: Jobs are now plentiful!

As the Associated Press put it, “The US job market has settled into a sweet spot of steadily solid growth.” At long last then, the American dream is back for working families, right? No. The AP article later admitted that the jobs market still is missing any “broad acceleration in pay.”

In other words, you can find work, but don’t expect to be paid. And forget about such “luxuries” as health coverage, pension, sick leave, vacation time, and having a regular schedule. These are not jobs, they’re jobettes! Most are in service work – from fast food chains to nursing homes and car washes. Nearly all are poorly paid, temporary, and routinely exploitative.

So many families have been in dire economic straits for so long that they’re now having to take such onerous, one-sided terms of employment, which – ironically – increases the power of low-wage corporations! With hundreds of thousands of people scrambling at once to find jobs, the bosses can effectively conspire to hold pay levels down and get away with treating hires as disposable cogs in the corporate profit machine. Indeed, the phenomenally-bloated profits they’ve been enjoying are largely extracted from the labor of these vulnerable workers they underpay. And in a double irony, corporations rationalize the obscene salaries and bonuses they give to top executives by pointing to those same profits the executives are taking out of the workers’ paychecks.

This selfish, self-perpetuating expansion of inequality is no “sweet spot” of solid growth – it’s the sign of a severely sick economy… and it will kill all hope of a democratic America unless We the People rise up to reject the plutocratic profiteers and politicians who’re inflicting such deadly disparity on our society.

“US job market looks solid 8 years after recession ended,” Associate Press, June 1, 2017.

“Jobs Report Finds Rate Is Lowest In 16 Years,” The New York Times, June 3, 2017.

“Jobless Rate Falls to 16-Year Low,” The Wall Street Journal, June 3, 2017.

I thought Donnie Trump and his fellow Republicans were big law ‘n’ order politicians. So, why are they trying to kill the sheriff and unleash thousands of robbers to run wild across America?

The sheriff they want to kill is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The thieves they’re out to help are corporate debt collectors who pay pennies on the dollar to buy huge data bases of overdue bills – then hound the borrowers to pay up. They profit from weak regulations that let them bully, harass, rob, and run roughshod over tens of thousands of consumers every year – including people who’ve already paid off their debt or never even incurred it.

Every year, the debt collection firms routinely abuse the law and overload our courts by rotely filing hundreds of thousands of lawsuits against debtors. Masses of these suits are backed by only flimsy, out-of-date, erroneous, forged, or non-existent evidence. Collectors don’t care about the evidence, however, for their intent is not to win in court, but to frighten or bamboozle borrowers into paying.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recently sided with the victims of this corporate thievery, proposing new rules to stop the abuse. The Trumpist Republicans have responded with outrage – not at the corporate outlaws, but at the sheriff! Their GOP’s 2016 party platform advocates abolishing the consumer bureau, calling it a “rogue agency” for daring to stand up to the real rogues that’re openly robbing workaday Americans.

Why are the GOP so shamefully-soft on crime? Because it is not just small fry debt collectors involved in this outlandish shakedown of innocent borrowers, but such Wall Street powerhouses as JPMorgan Chase and Citibank – which are also generous political donors to Republican candidates.

Daylight robbery is a crime… or not. Depends on who is robbing whom.

You don’t have to be in “Who’s Who” to know what’s what. For example, if a tiny group of Wall Street bankers, billionaires, and their political puppets are allowed to write the rules that govern our economy and elections, guess what? Only bankers, billionaires, and puppets will profit from those rules.

That’s exactly why our Land of Opportunity has become today’s Land of Inequality. Corporate elites have bought their way into the policy-making backrooms of Washington, where they’ve rigged the rules to let them feast freely on our jobs, devour our country’s wealth, and impoverish the middle class.

There’s good news, however! A growing grassroots coalition of churches, unions, civil rights groups, citizen activists, and many others is organizing and mobilizing us to crash through those closed doors, write our own rules and reverse America’s plunge into plutocracy. Called “Take On Wall Street,” the coalition’s structural reforms include:

To learn more about this campaign and its reform agenda to democratize America’s financial system, go to www.TakeOnWallStreet.org.

What’s the matter with these people? The Trumpsters in the White House and Congress, I mean.

Start with The Donald himself. What’s wrong with him that he would require the top officials of his government to humiliate themselves publicly, making them try to outdo each other in a groveling Worship-a-thon of praise for his magnificence? On June 12, at the first meeting of his full cabinet – including the Vice President, Treasury Secretary, Secretary of State, and all the other supposedly-powerful luminaries of the Government of the United States of America – all were called upon to say their name, then meekly offer their smarmiest praise of Trump’s integrity, agenda, and manly leadership. He even had it televised! This spectacle of forced adulation of “The Leader” was so eerily insane that even North Korea’s Kim Jong-un would’ve been too embarrassed to orchestrate it!

Yet, Trump wasn’t satiated by superlatives from his cabinet of sycophants. Instead, he publicly stroked his own ego with the fanciful claim that Americans are “seeing amazing results” from his presidency. Shifting into overdrive, the chief proclaimed that “never has there been a president – [except maybe] FDR – who’s passed more legislation, who’s done more things than what we’ve done.”

Uh… no, Mr. President. Not actually. Not even close. I realize you don’t “believe” in facts, but here’s one to sober you up: The Trump White House has produced no major legislation. None. Zero.

You’re right, however, that we Americans are seeing truly “amazing results” from your six months on the job: We’re amazed that in such a short time your so-called presidency is mired in conflicts of interest, constitutional quagmires, erratic behavior, ideological arrogance, tweeted ignorance, lame policy proposals, and – let’s admit the obvious – you own incompetence.

*Populist author, public speaker, and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes The Hightower Lowdown, a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.

“Flatterers First, Then President Praises Himself,” The New York Times, June 13, 2017.

Good news, people – at last, congressional Democrats have gotten a clue, grown some spine, and are beginning to act like… well, like Democrats!

In particular, a majority of Dems in the US House are responding to the rising public demand that decent health care be treated as a right for everyone, rather than being rationed by profiteering insurance conglomerates. Nearly 6 of 10 Dems in the House have now signed on to Rep. John Conyers’ “Medicare for All” bill, which is being carried in the Senate by Bernie Sanders.

So – Hallelujah, progress!

Yes, but there are many speed bumps to overcome before the Democratic Party gets onto the moral high road of politics. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, for one. When the leader of House Democrats was asked if the party should make health-care-for-all a major issue in Congress and in the 2018 elections, she replied with a flat “no.” Basically, Pelosi says “the American people” aren’t ready for it – by which she really means that the narrow slice of the public that inhabits her world – health industry executives, lobbyists, and campaign donors – aren’t ready. Meanwhile, a good 60 percent of regular Americans are damned sure ready, telling pollsters that our government has a responsibility to ensure that everyone gets the care they need.

Let’s be blunt: When it comes to the fiery leadership that America’s grassroots people want and need, the Democratic Party establishment is weaker than Canadian hot sauce. When you’ve got 60 percent of your party’s rank-and-file congressional members ready to go, and 60 percent of the public is also ready to go – it’s time to go! The national party’s “leadership” must get going on health care for all, or the leadership itself must go.

To help push both the party and the issue forward, forward go to www.NationalNursesUnited.org.

“Democrats Move Left on Universal Health Care,” The New York Times, June 4, 2017.

“Things Get Personal In a Debate In Georgia,” The New York Times, June 9, 2017.