REMINDER! Join us TONIGHT at 6pm CT for happy hour live with Cory Haala, author of “When Democrats Won the Heartland.”

Other than the fact that they are such blood-sucking greedheads, why have today’s multibillionaires, high-tech barons of AI become so despised by so many grassroots Americans?

By “so many,” I mean they’ve sparked a hell-raising mass revolt, originating in farm country, spreading through working-class suburbs, into community colleges, and other centers of Middle America – now including environmental, religious, and democracy movements.

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This is a genuine populist rebellion of workaday families against the corporate oligarchy of Musk, Zuckerberg, Altman, Bezos, and other “geniuses” of artificial intelligence. The billionaires are racing to install millions of supersmart A.I. robots in nearly every workplace, from manufacturing to health care, farming to finance.

Amazingly, the tech elites consider themselves to be “humanitarians,” for they say turning work over to A.I. would free humans to… well, do what? Geniuses can’t bothered with such mundane details, so they’re not interested of soon-to-be displaced masses of people who’ll be “made redundant.”

So – hello – people are revolting (in the very best sense of that term). Interestingly, some of the strongest backlash is coming from a huge group generally assumed to be politically apathetic or enthusiastic about all technology: Young people. Columnist Michelle Goldberg reports that several tech honchos who’ve given college commencement speeches this month were startled when they launched into gushing praise for the glorious future promised by A.I. They were practically driven off-stage by roaring cascades of boos from the students!

The pain that A.I. profiteers are imposing is one thing, but an even greater cause of this spreading revolt is the imperious arrogance and stupidity of royal elites who think ordinary people don’t matter. Did these oligarchs never hear about the revolution of 1776?

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To stay on top of the rapid development of AI and its impact on the public interest, check out the work of the AI Now Institute, ainowinstitute.org.

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Get your cold ones ready, we’re gearing up for a happy hour together that you don’t want to miss! On Tuesday, May 26th at 6pm CT, Hightower will sit down with historian Cory Haala for a live conversation about Haala's new book, When Democrats Won the Heartland — and paid subscribers can jump in with questions by leaving them here in the comments.

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Haala spent a years in the archives — including Hightower’s own papers at UT Austin — building the case that the Democrats who held onto rural America in the 1980s did it by going harder at the corporate class, not softer. And wouldn’t you know it, Hightower turned out to be a central figure in that story.

Watch the live stream here

Which brings me to the piece below, first published here a few years ago—a reader asked why farmers vote Republican. Hightower’s answer is essentially the argument Haala’s book makes, sourced from Jim’s own experience living it, including the moment Walter Mondale called him “a little hot.”

I certainly share the frustration with groups that vote Republican, seemingly against their own interests. But have groups like farmers abandoned Democrats, or has Democratic Party Policy abandoned them?

As Lyndon Johnson used to say, “You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.” Yet that’s exactly what our party started trying to do on farm policy in the 1970s.

While Democratic leaders praised family farm values, they were busily empowering the bankers, global grain traders, big meatpackers, seed monopolists, and other agribusiness giants to grow bigger and squeeze the economic life out of family farms. The American Ag Movement’s huge tractorcade rebellion in the ‘70s and early ‘80s (see this issue of the Lowdown from May 2019) went after Earl “Get Big or Get Out” Butz, but it was especially outraged that the Democratic Party of Carter-Mondale used fiscal policy (high interest rates) and global trade hokum to impose Butz’ plutocratic dictum on them.

The hard truth is that Washington’s Democratic leadership intentionally chose in the 1970s to abandon the Farm-Labor coalition of the New Deal in pursuit of corporate campaign cash from agribusiness. As Texas Agriculture Commissioner, I was part of these tractorcade protests, and both publicly and privately, I kept trying to convince Democratic congressional leaders to get back to our family farm roots. Are we going to push a bold, grassroots farm program, I asked the House Ag chairman, or just tinker around the edges of the corporate status quo? “Oh,” he said, with a condescending smile, “I imagine we’ll just tinker around the edges.” They did.

Around 1980, a US senator, who was my friend and ally, suggested to Vice President Mondale that they “ought to bring in Hightower on the farm issue.” He told me that Mondale responded: “Isn’t he a little hot?”

So there’s the problem. Farmers are not fooled that Republican ag policies are any good, but they do see that the once proud-and-true farmer party sold them out, abandoning the rural electorate to GOP charlatans who at least show up to campaign for the farm and rural vote.

I supported Mondale in his 1984 run to prevent another four years of the God Awful Reagan regime. Talking with Mondale late that year, he knew he was losing and was frustrated by it, and he snapped accusingly at me: “Your farmers are voting for Reagan.” First, they weren’t “my” farmers. Second, he didn’t seem to realize that his corporatized farm platform was the same ol’ status quo all over again. If we Democrats don’t stand unequivocally for family farmers, why do we they think they should stand with us? We have to get hot, or we’ll never win them back.

That was the 1980s. Haala’s book asks what it would have looked like if the party had listened. Join us Tuesday to find out — and to ask Cory your own questions.

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Not a paid subscriber yet? This is a good week to become one!

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For decades, a major maker of these trusty instruments has been a company in New Britain, Connecticut, appropriately named The Stanley Works.

Today, having taken over other big brands like Craftsman and Black & Decker, Stanley is a $15-billion-a-year conglomerate, and many former-workers are asking, “Stanley works for whom?” That’s because corporate top executives have quietly orchestrated a decades-long move of Stanley factories out of our country, abandoning the skilled machinists who literally made the brand successful.

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The final blow comes this week, when Stanley will shut down the last of its redbrick factories in New Britain. An odd move, since workers there produced one of Stanley’s most iconic products: The “PowerLock” tape measure. It is enormously popular – indeed, I have two of them. Yet, corporate bosses claim that cheaper, foreign-made tape measures now dominate the market, so – Poof! – goodbye 300 American jobs.

But wait, Stanley didn’t eliminate the jobs, it just moved them. To Thailand, where labor is paid 75% less than in Connecticut. Indeed, the major foreign competitor to Stanley turns out to be… Stanley! It has been building modernized production factories in Thailand, even as it divested in US factories and increased shipments of its foreign-made tape measures to the US.

Stanley’s CEO was paid $7.6 million last year. Nice, but now, the paychecks of 300 more workers can be reallocated to global shareholders… and give another hike in the chief’s pay. And that’s how the Inequality Merry-Go-Round keeps spinning… round and round and round.

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To fight for good jobs and an economy that benefits everyone, check out and support the work of Jobs with Justice, jwj.org.

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That was BBE, however – “Before Billionaire Ethics.” Today, a cohort of über-rich hucksters – including Bezos, Altman, Musk, and Zuckerberg – have unilaterally decreed that they are above such moral fussiness, entitled to exploit the scarce water resources of millions of Americans, especially in rural areas.

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They’re not irrigating crops, but continuously spritzing hundreds of thousands of the super-computers they’re “planting” in the hyperscale AI data centers being built across the country. These are “computer ranches,” digesting and constantly spewing out electronic data to run artificial intelligence bots that the tech billionaires are creating to replace us human workers.

Jobs aside, each of these concrete complexes is a massive water hog. Amazon, Meta, and the rest use millions of gallons a day of fresh, unrecycled water, just to keep their computers cool. Hello – states like Texas face recurring drought, yet billionaires insist on draining our aquifers and rivers to water their computers! In Texas alone, more than 400 of these sprawling data centers have already been built or are under construction.

Meanwhile, a grassroots “What The Hell” movement is spreading across the country. But don’t expect billionaires to show even an iota of respect for the Common Good. Indeed, they’re now funding an all-out PR blitz and political campaign to demonize these local rebellions. Worse, they are doubling down on their plutocratic power grab, demanding that Congress pre-emptively outlaw state and local officials from regulating, much less barring, these invasive schemes.

To help battle these profiteering bastards, go to www.mediajustice.org/tools.

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“The captain told us to ford a river,
That’s how it all begun.
We were knee deep in the Big Muddy
But the big fool said to push on.

“It’ll be a little soggy, but just keep slogging
We’ll soon be on dry ground.
We were waist deep in the Big Muddy,
And the big fool said to push on.

“All we need is a little determination.
Men, follow me, I’ll lead.
We were neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.”

Fight the Big Fools →

Unfortunately, the big fool is back, this time miring our nation in another of those witless wars of choice that he had ridiculed when running for President. But, doing the bidding of Israel’s corrupt government, Trump attacked Iran. He blustered that the “skirmish” would be over in days, Iran would surrender everything, our gasoline prices would go down, peace would blossom throughout the Middle East, and world leaders would rally ‘round America.

None of that happened. Instead, Trump has splurged 25 billion of our dollars on this foray (so far), Iran’s leadership has outwitted Trump’s feckless Pentagon chief, and they now control the global price of oil.

To divert attention from the embarrassment of his needless war, our huckster-in-chief is now doing PR events touting the “grandeur” of that billion-dollar luxury ballroom he wants to tack onto our White House – a rich-boy add-on that only the billionaire class will go into.

Of all the things America actually needs, he is focused on a sparkly ballroom. And the big fool says to push on.

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Two things: First, on the ideology question, I’m with Woody Guthrie: “Right-wing, left-wing, chicken wing,” he said. I think Woody meant that most workaday people don’t put 10-cents worth of faith in doctrinaire promises of political ideologues. Rather, they’re looking for honest answers to the old labor song: “which side are you on” – the bosses, bankers, and billionaires, or the rest of us?

Keep Jim rabble-rousing 🎉

Second, on the matter of seriousness, I find that both the Democratic party and the larger progressive movement have gotten way too serious. They’ve become lost in their latest 21-point plan, email “outreach” strategies, hourly fundraising targets, zoom meet-ups, and other digitalized corporate metrics of how-to-manipulate politics.

But wait ­– what is “politics?” My dictionary says it’s “The science and art of forming a community effort to seek and exercise power in public affairs.” Why would we try to make such a spirited, unifying, social pursuit into a rote, tedious, manipulative “game”? Instead, what if Democrats actually brought people together, not to recite pre-cut positions, but around community interests? And let’s create events that people (especially newcomers) might want to go to – mix the politics and issues with a little food, beer, and wine, live music, and… well, fun.

When I first ran for office, my lifelong co-conspirator, Susan DeMarco, came up with the perfect expression for such politicking. She said, “Let’s put the party back in politics!”

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My first grab for the gusto of Texas politics came in 1980, when I ran for an oddity of an office called the Texas Railroad Commission. Despite its quaint name, this three-member outfit has zilch to do with railroads and much to do with regulating the powerful oil industry and utilities. I ran as a consumer advocate, making me about as welcome as a tornado in a trailer park.

One day as I was campaigning in Tyler (supposedly a bastion of East Texas business-minded conservatism), I was escorted by a local supporter into the office of a county judge who was one of the area’s power brokers. “Be careful here,” my escort cautioned. “This ol’ boy is terribly conservative, so don’t dump your whole load on him.”

The judge waved me in, leaned way back in his big swivel chair, propped his feet on the edge of his long desk, clasped his hands over his chest, and almost seemed to drift off as I made my newly modulated pitch on why Texas needed me on the Railroad Commission. When I got to the punch line—usually a fulsome tirade about how the incumbents are nothing but a pack of egg-sucking dogs running side by side with the thieves they’re supposed to be watching—I went all mealy-mouthed and mumbled that maybe some of the commissioners were acting kind of in a somewhat biased fashion against us consumers.

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I’m talking about prestigious, frontline, brand-name billionaires: Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and other Silicon Valley Royals who perceive themselves as otherworldly geniuses. As such, they feel entitled to redesign your, my, and humanity’s future – whether we want them to or not.

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So, for months, these techno-oligarchs have been furtively imposing a multitrillion-dollar network of invasive data centers all across America. Why? To power a whole new mechanomorphic species they call “generative AI chatbots.” Musk gushes that the super-intelligent bots will be “more human than humans” able to reproduce themselves, evolve, and displace us primitives in nearly every workplace.

Which raises the question: Could this gaggle of billionaire megalomaniacs get any goofier?

Gosh, yes! Musk, Thiel, and others have become disciples of a Swedish “philosopher” named Bostrom. He idealizes a “post-human future” in which us biological earthlings literally merge into the digital machine race. Indeed, investigative Substack, , reports that Musk has already launched a venture to produce implants to fuse human brains with computers.

Meanwhile, Thiel, the PayPal/Palantir billionaire, says policymakers should stop worrying about little problems like world wars and climate change, for “transhumanism” technology will create a digital species that is immortal. He also warns ominously that anyone who tries to regulate AI is doing the bidding of “The Antichrist.”

Then there’s Google’s goofy billionaire, Larry Page, who blithely says “if we let digital minds be free… the outcome is almost certain to be good.” Almost certain? Sure, Larry, unbridled tech never goes bad, right?

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been at the forefront of the fight to protect humans from and with tech advances for decades, and their work on the impact of AI is vital. Dive in here to join up with them.

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Millions of workaday Americans today are wailing that blues refrain, thanks to price increases caused by Donald Trump’s slap-happy tariff policy. He gloated that by imposing import levies of $166 billion on foreign companies, they would be forced to lower the prices they charge us. But, Professor Trump, nearly all tariffs are passed along to us consumers, so you’re raising our prices! Indeed, on average, his tariffs have jacked up costs for every American household by about $1,500 a year!

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But the Supreme Court has now decreed Trump’s tariffs illegal, so those who paid them are entitled to refunds. Great! Walmart rushed to the front of the line, demanding a $10 billion refund, while other giants are demanding paybacks of more than a billion each.

But wait. What about you? Those corporations had paid Trump’s tariffs with money they got by raising prices on you and me. In short, WE THE CONSUMERS paid about 90 percent of that $166 billion out of our pockets. So where’s our refund?

So far, only Costco has publicly pledged to pass the refund back to its customers, while other corporate giants just wink and pocket the cash. For example, a Walmart executive simply announced that “[We will] certainly avail ourselves” of any refund process.

Economists have a technical word for that process: “Stealing.” The Walmarts jack up their prices to pay for Trump’s tariff scam, then grab the refunds that workaday consumers are owed. As Ray Charles sang in another blues number: “Why you treat me so mean?”

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Tired of corporations stealing from you? Our friends at Public Citizen have a whole catalog of resources dedicated to tariffs—get involved here.

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Take mingy CEOs of multibillion-dollar powerhouses like Amazon and 7-Eleven. They’ve been refusing to accommodate even the simplest needs of – get this – their pregnant employees.

As the New York Times reports, women who’re heavy with child can suffer acute health crises if they’re on their feet too long. For example, a pregnant Amazon warehouse worker in upstate New York became breathless and lightheaded, so her doctor told her to work sitting down periodically. She got a chair and felt better. But uh-uh, an Amazon manager took her chair away and insisted she stand! This caused her to be hospitalized several times. Then, Amazon fired her for having too many medical absences.

🥊 Keep Jim swinging

Or take the 27-year-old pregnant check-out clerk at Speedway, the gas station chain owned by 7-Eleven. To ease the strain of standing for hours, she was allowed to sit on some milk crates as she worked the counter. No, barked higher-ups, who took her crates away. She soon had a pregnancy emergency, and her doctor told her not to work for several days. So, Speedway put her on “involuntary unpaid leave.” But, technically she wasn’t fired, so the corporate giant prevented her from getting unemployment pay.

This is corporate assault, targeting women in low-wage jobs. It’s so common that Congress had to pass a law, the “Pregnant Workers Fairness Act,” to say: Stop it! But it hasn’t stopped, for Trump officials are not eager to punish multimillion-dollar corporate bosses. But that raises the fundamental ethical question: Why don’t bosses stop themselves?

Have I mentioned that “boss,” spelled backwards, is double-S-O-B?

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But what you won’t find is any town called “Moderate, Texas.” I offer this curiosity to the monied powers and milquetoast party leaders who keep insisting that Democrats must moderate their progressive policies, abandon their egalitarian commitments, and become more… well, more corporate.

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Hello – today’s majority hates the everyday arrogance, avarice, and abuse that corporate supremacy has unleashed on workers, consumers, local businesses, family farmers, the poor, the sick, the “different,” our environment… and democracy itself.

The time when “captains of industry” were admired is long-gone. Today’s billionaire prigs – such as Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg – are clownishly greedy and foolish, becoming so reviled that they can’t go out in public. As journalist Perry Bacon points out in New Republic, even moderate Democrats aren’t moderate anymore: “Around 70 percent” of them, he reports, bemoan the fact that Party leaders are “too timid in taxing the rich, taxing corporations, and cracking down on companies that break the law.”

Polls aside, you can find out how moderates (and even conservatives) feel about moving the Party of the People to the middle of the road by visiting rural areas in Virginia, Illinois, Texas, or other states being invaded by autocratic corporate billionaires trying to usurp vast amounts of land water and energy for their AI data centers. Locals are furious at this plutocratic power grab and wondering if anyone will stand with them in full-force populist rebellion against the profiteers.

We’re in a 1932 moment. Far from becoming a corporate kiss-up party, people want and need Democrats to be the kick-ass party!

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The farm crisis of the mid-80s was real and ugly. Commodity prices had fallen below the cost of production. Rural banks were failing. The factories that built farm equipment were laying off half their workers. Hightower put it plainly:

“The people who are going out of business today are people who are the full-time, medium-sized, fully mechanized family operator — the entrepreneur who has become efficient, productive, competitive, innovative, and broke. They’ve done everything that the free enterprise system has asked of them, but they cannot get a fair price for their commodity.”

He also had a joke about it:

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No, their ears are stuffed with ever-increasing wads of political cash from corporations and the superrich, so our words can’t reach their eardrums. Take Tim Sheehy, a Montana Republican elected two years ago to the US Senate. He quickly proved to be a tail-wagging fetcher of more plutocratic tax-giveaways and most anything else the billionaire class desires.

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Why? Money. His campaign was launched and supercharged by such barons of Wall Street and Silicon Valley as Steve Schwarzman. Honcho of a private equity powerhouse, Schwarzman greased Sheehy’s political skids with an $8 million check. A New York Times analysis later found that at least 63 other billionaire families bought a piece of the fledgling Montana senator that year.

He’s not their only purchase, of course. The Times’ tally found 300 billionaire families invested more than $3 billion in federal candidates in 2024.

Meanwhile, not only does Congress do what We the People don’t want, they also refuse to do what we do want. Most emphatically, that includes a huge, bipartisan majority who want all corporate money out of political races and solid limits on donations by the rich.

Big Money is a stark threat to America, says Marc Raciot, Montana’s former Republican governor. It’s turning our democratic republic into a place where a few wealthy people can legally spend millions to direct how the government runs. “Does any reasonable person on the planet think that’s appropriate,” he asks?

To help assert a people’s democracy over corporate plutocracy, go to EndCitizensUnited.org.

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For example, travel deep into Southwest Texas to the Mexican border, and you’ll witness two powerful forces of political harmony in Big Bend National Park. First is the true majesty of nature – 1,200 square miles of high desert beauty, spectacular canyons, the Chisos Mounains’ “sky islands,” black bears and jaguars, ancient artifacts of native peoples, etc.

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But you could also experience the marvelous rebellious spirit of today’s Big Bend people who are battling the White House’s ideological extremists. At issue is “The Wall,” the xenophobic piece of nastiness pushed by Stephen Miller, the Trump government’s tyrannical, anti-immigrant chief. Build a multi-billion-dollar, 30-foot-high steel wall atop the Rio Grande’s fragile, thousand-foot high cliffs, Miller maniacally commanded!

Hello – such a monstrous wall would destroy the cliffs, devastate the economic, cultural, and other essential cross-border relationships that Big Bend communities rely on – and do nothing to stop desperate refugees. So, in a grassroots, non-partisan rebellion against such ideological bullstuff, a majority coalition of ranchers, environmentalists, local sheriffs, native Americans, and just folks have momentarily stalled the scheme. As a longtime Republican resident puts it: “Those advocating for this insane project should… acknowledge their nonsensical, aesthetically, and environmentally quixotic conduct, so their names may be indelibly placed on that border wall and remembered forever in infamy.”

This is Jim Hightower saying… Trump is expected to push ahead, but the feisty grassroots champions are not intimidated. “We will be civil,” says one leader, “but we don’t have to be polite.” Stay connected to them at nobigbendwall.org.

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Greetings, Lowdowners! Deanna here. We’ve been digging through Jim’s archives lately — working on something we can’t fully talk about yet, but will soon. What we keep finding is pieces that are not only great, vintage Hightower, but also history lessons that help us understand how we got to where we are.

This one, from April 2003, explains exactly how corporations became “people” under the Constitution — not through legislation, not through a court ruling, but through a clerical error. Hightower was writing it in the shadow of a case that seemed like it might finally fix the problem… it didn’t. Seven years later, Citizens United happened, and now you know how the the Court paved the way for it to succeed.

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They refer to themselves, of course, demanding that public officials, farmers, towns, environmentalists, and all others get out of their way as they impose their massive AI data centers over rural America. “Our Big Money and Big Brains,” they exclaim, “will remake nature and produce phenomenal wealth.”

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Haven’t we heard this before? Yes… and from these same über-rich zealots. Just a decade ago, they declared they intended to replace farmland agriculture with a techno-marvel they called “vertical farms.” Yes, instead of relying on messy, natural stuff like soil, food would henceforth be produced on sanitary plastic strays stacked to the ceilings of windowless factory warehouses controlled by computer networks. Big Tech investors like Jeff Bezos, Walmart, and Japan’s SoftBank plowed hundreds of billions of dollars into their “reinvention” of agriculture.

But what the geniuses actually produced was a bumper crop of bankruptcies, for the tech bros knew nothing about farming. Sure, displacing nature meant saving money to till the soil and feed the hogs, but those costs are nothing compared to the piles of capital required to pay for the ever-rising costs of corporate infrastructure, computers, utilities, executive salaries, administrative overhead… and capital itself.

Worse, the clueless corporatizers were surprised to discover that consumers are not actually motivated to buy a head of lettuce just because it was “vertically farmed.” So, with exorbitant costs and zero market appeal, the tech geniuses’ ag revolution fizzled.

Let us all recall this as Bezos and his billionaire coterie now insist we must follow them into their Brave New World of artificial intelligence.

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Magic City Books put up a sign that rocketed through the Internet, mocking the fatuous potentates:

Arrogantly, though, the likes of Amazon, Google, and Meta are frontloading trillions of dollars into creating a new social order managed by super-intelligent bots. This scheme, however, requires them to divert vast amounts of rural land, water, and energy to build and run their Orwellian empires. Yet, breathing the fumes of their own egos, the billionaires actually assumed that locals would welcome this dazzling bot wonderworld.

Keep Hightower swinging 🥊

Bad assumption. Even in bastions of rural Republican rule, majorities are saying, “Uh… Hell No!” Indeed, at least 48 data centers were stopped last year by coordinated local opposition, and public fury has largely driven data center developers out of Illinois, Michigan, Oregon, and Wisconsin. In Texas, corrupt governor Greg Abbott openly takes AI cash to push data centers, yet rural counties are rejecting them – and the state’s far-right Republican Party has now voted to oppose building more of them.

Even Wall Street money managers are blinking, for there’s growing doubt that investors can get their money back. What’s happening is that the billionaire hucksters have run head-first into the rock-solid political belief that The People get to decide our common destiny, not a handful of techno-scammers.

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The scammers have varied from Big Oil’s notorious land men to peddlers of private prisons. But this one is the biggest, most important flimflam yet, with Silicon Valley billionaires and Wall Street speculators rushing through the countryside buying up vast tracts of land.

Keep Hightower swinging ✊

Why? Because Amazon, Google, Meta, and dozens of other tech profiteers are converting their corporations into Artificial Intelligence robotic empires, and each AI facility is absolutely humongous, requiring airport-size swaths of land.

Acreage is the least of it though, for the data centers consume Niagara Falls-levels of water. So local families, farms, factories, and businesses suddenly find their essential water supply being raided by faraway corporate water suckers.

Also, local utility bills skyrocket as profiteers drain enormous amounts of electric power from the area’s grid. Worse, corporate lobbyists squeeze local officials to subsidize this thievery! For example, a private equity predator named Apollo Global Management recently fleeced a New York county for $1.4 billion in “job-creation” subsidies for a sprawling data center that will – get this – employ only 125 people. Yes, that’s $11 million per job – with actual workers only getting a pittance of it.

You don’t need a big schnoz to smell this stink. The good news is that county officials across the country are beginning to say “NO” to AI’s money grab. Also, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have proposed a national moratorium on this corporate frenzy to impose an AI future that We the People do not want. For more information and action, go to foodandwaterwatch.org.

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Either way, they do seem to go together – as in Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and so forth, ad nauseum. Oddly, the richer they get, the whinier they become, devolving into over-privileged crybabies.

Spread it around 🌱

Consider the appalling example of that California clique of Thiel, Zuck, and other Silicon super-richies. They’ve been caterwauling that if voters approve a proposed wealth tax on billionaires, By Gollies, they’ll just up and abandon the state. So? Do they not know that voters know that nearly all tax subsidies have long profited undeserving vainglorious elites like them at everyone else’s expense? So excuse us if we don’t join their pity party. In fact, most of us commoners would gladly trade that whole pack of pompous plutocrats for a dozen good kindergarten teachers.

Besides, it’s possible to be both very rich and a decent human being! I’ve known such people. For example, Texas businessman, Bernard Rapoport, who devoted millions to advancing labor, women, and our state’s progressive movement. Or my friends, Ben & Jerry, who’ve spent their lifetimes and fortunes delivering financial help – and even ice cream! – to grassroots democracy fighters. Then there’s the example of heirs to the Pillsbury family fortune – calling themselves the “Pillsbury Doughboys,” then later, “Doughgirls.” They have donated their inheritances to progressive causes benefitting the Common Good.

As an East Texas farmer pointed out to me years ago: “Money is like manure. You can’t just pile it up. It only works if you spread it across the grassroots.”

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Greetings, Lowdowners! We got our hands on something special this week.

In October 1988 — twelve days before the presidential election — Hightower stood before the City Club of Portland, Oregon, stumping for Michael Dukakis. He was Texas Agriculture Commissioner and he’d just given a barnburner speech at the Democratic National Convention. As Hightower said to the crowd, you’re probably wondering what an agriculture commissioner has to say to a bunch of city folk, but: “If you eat, you’re involved in agriculture.”

It was wild to watch and hear how much of politics in 1988 mirrors what’s happening today, and that kind of thing tells me: We’ve fought it before, beat it back, and even made progess. We’ll keep fighting. Check these choice moments out:

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