This plotline could have come from one of Charles Dickens’ novels about upper-class depravity: “Miserly governors refuse to provide gruel for poverty-stricken ragamuffins.”
Unfortunately, this is not a novel, but modern-day reality taking place in 15 states, where right-wing officeholders have scorned a federal program to provide food this summer for millions of children mired in poverty.
“No!” bark these political ideologues. Seeking to punish poverty, they piously demonize public aid ... even for hungry children! This program hardly lavishes luxury dining on anyone, offering only $40 per child in groceries. Not for one meal or even a week, but $40 a month — about a buck-thirty a day. Feast on that!
Yet, the politicos in such deeply impoverished states as Mississippi and Louisiana have arrogantly shunned this minimal assistance their people so desperately need. Worse, so have the mingy governors of super-rich states like Florida and Texas, where millions of children need this food. Also, note that these elitist governors are personally wealthy, yet they have no ethical qualms about taxpayers picking up the tab for their pricey meals.
Then there’s the pathetic duplicity of Iowa governor Kim Reynolds. She rejected the grocery benefit for her state’s children, asserting that it “does nothing to promote nutrition” and could contribute to childhood obesity. Well, gosh, Gov, providing food has actually proven to be nutritionally beneficial for children. On the other hand, she’s right that denying food to children definitely can cause them to lose weight! Thanks, Kim.
Turning down food assistance for poor children is shockingly callous, just plain mean ... and politically stupid, even for right-wing puritanical ideologues. The good news is that 35 states, five U.S. territories and four Native American tribes have welcomed the summer program. Learn more at FeedingAmerica.org.
Heeere they come again: The wrecking crew of Alito, Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts and Thomas — the six plutocratic judicial supremacists determined to force their personal political biases on all of us.
The latest ploy of this right-wing cabal is to gut the ability of public agencies to issue regulations protecting people from health care rip-offs, consumer price gougers, labor abusers, toxic polluters, and other corporate profiteers. The six-person Republican majority controlling the court is about to decree that when reigning in corporate abuses, public agencies can only take specific regulatory actions that Congress puts into law.
Sounds good in theory, but in real life, Congress has no ability to itemize the ever-changing list of actions needed to stop the abuses. Thus Congress (and “We the People”) rely on the diligence and expertise of agencies to make the law work. So, the court’s sneaky maneuver is just judicial smoke and mirrors, benefitting ... well, who?
“Overregulated small businesses,” wailed the court’s six laissez-faire ideologues. Indeed, to make their legal ruling, the six had handpicked a case involving a couple of small fishing companies complaining about federal rules to prevent the overfishing of herring. But wait — look who’s steering those little fishermen’s legal boat: Charles Koch, the ultra-billionaire, anti-regulation extremist! His secretive political operation recruited the herring fishermen to be his corporate pawns and is orchestrating this judicial flimflam.
Moreover, Koch’s surreptitious network also funded and orchestrated the political placement of today’s corporate majority on the Supreme Court.
Yet, America’s corporate media establishment papers over this judicial coup. A recent AP headline, for example, meekly reports that “Conservative Interests Take Aim at Regulations.” No — Koch forces are not conservative, they’re corporate supremacists. And they’re not aiming at “regulations” — but at you and me.
In the 1980s, many Texans were alarmed that hordes of immigrants were fleeing Rust Belt states and pouring across the Red River to take our jobs. So, my friend Steve Fromholz recommended a big beautiful wall across our northern border to keep them out.
But Fromholz — a popular singer-songwriter and renown political sprite — was ahead of his time in the political sport of wall-building. Instead of steel barriers and miles of nasty razor wire, Steve proposed preventing Yankee refugees from entering the Lone Star State by planting a 10-foot high, 10-foot thick wall of jalapeno peppers along the length of the Red River. Eat your way through ... and you’d be accepted as a naturalized Texan.
I thought of Steve’s impishness when I read that Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis and other Republicans were concocting a whole new xenophobic bugaboo to goose up their anti-immigrant demagoguery. We can’t just fear the “invasion” coming across our Southern border, they cry! Indeed, Haley wailed: “It’s the northern border, too” — adding ominously that we must “do whatever it takes to keep people out.” And then DeSantis piled on, saying we should wall off America’s Canadian border.
Meanwhile, nearly all residents living along that 5,500-mile boundary fear the political wall-mongers more than the imaginary threat of foreigners surging across illegally. “People have always been coming through Canada,” says a clerk at a general store in far-north New Hampshire. Scoffing at the silly political hype, she says: “I don’t think the residents are really worried.”
But Chicken-Little politicos won’t be shooed off by reality. After all, they still have the east, west and gulf coasts to shut off — so expect them to propose razor wire for the entire U.S. shoreline. Their ridiculousness makes Fromholz’s satire seem rational!
Farming can be a deeply satisfying life; you’re connected directly to nature, you are your own boss, and you do work that’s real, benefitting humanity.
But then there are the pests — such as invasive bugs, monopolistic profiteers ... and a new, exceptionally destructive plague: billionaires. Yes, flocks of predatory ultra-billionaires, wanting not just to gouge farmers but to take away their farms.
The crassest example of this land grab is happening now in Solano County, California, a bucolic agricultural area just north of San Francisco. A gaggle of narcissistic Silicon Valley tech titans with maximum bank accounts and minimal ethics has arrogantly (and surreptitiously) been spending nearly a billion dollars in an investment hustle to buy out and pave over every farm in the county.
Led by a former Wall Street huckster literally known as “Golden Boy,” the titans pose as altruistic futurists intending to turn this rural county into a magical technetronic haven of urban affluence and sophistication. Agriculture, they say, is the low-yield economy of yesterday, wasting valuable real estate on farming. So, farmers must sell out and get out of the way, allowing so these capitalist visionaries to grow a new “Mega-City of the Future.”
But not everyone in Solano was charmed, with many refusing to sell to Golden Boy. So, flush with self-entitlement, the Silicon Valley Money Lords are trying to muscle the uppity rural holdouts by suing them for — get this — refusing to sell their farms! The lawsuit is BS, of course, but it’s meant to crush the farmers with legal fees.
Altruistic visionaries? In a note soliciting others to invest in this thuggish thievery, one of the billionaires bluntly touted the syndicate’s real motivation, gushing that the Solano land grab can be spectacularly profitable for investors.
A decade ago, Oklahoma’s countryside was literally infested with 626 massively polluting CAFOs — Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. These are nightmarish creatures of industrial agribusiness, each one caging thousands of chickens, hogs or cattle in huge concrete and steel buildings and producing rivers of excrement. Imagine living next to one!
But — Hallelujah — responding to the outrage of rural neighbors, environmentalists and animal rights advocates, Oklahoma’s political honchos have since stepped in with regulations to eliminate 90% of those CAFOs. Wow! How’d they do that?
The old-fashioned way: political fraud. At the behest of chicken lobbyists for factory farm giants like Tyson Foods, state lawmakers — hocus-pocus! — let CAFOs rebrand themselves as PFOs, “Poultry Feeding Operations.” It’s the same old stink by a new name — only worse, for the state’s PFO designation let’s corporate profiteers get away with providing fewer protections for Oklahoma communities they subject to the overwhelming stench, contamination, flies, disease and other nasties inherent in caging more than 300,000 birds at a time in one spot.
For example, merely switching a factory’s registration from a federal CAFO to a state PFO lets these industrial polluters locate right across the road from family homes, bringing such constant odor, debris and disease that people can’t open their windows or play in their yard. The PFO scheme also eliminates a requirement that neighbors have to be notified when a chicken factory proposes to locate next door, and state officials have even outlawed legal protests against their rubber stamping of water permits for these polluters.
Here’s a solution: Require that all politicos who took chicken campaign cash and voted for the PFO scam must have one installed next to their homes. And why not put one next door to the Capitol building, too? Share the stink!
Once again, my invitation to the big shindig in Davos never arrived. Davos is the posh resort village in the Swiss Alps where some 3,000 global power elites gather every January for a weeklong, corporate-funded schmooze-and-booze fest to solve the world’s problems.
You and I are never invited to this confab, grandiosely titled “World Economic Forum.” That’s because (1) we’re not corporate or governmental VIPs, and (2) we might raise rude questions like, “Who the hell elected you plutocratic know-nothings and screw-ups to solve world problems — which you largely created?” See? We the People can’t be trusted to be polite.
Indeed, the theme of this year’s forum is, “How Can We Rebuild Trust?” By “we,” they mean the Davos clique itself — the Wall Street bankers, Silicon Valley speculators, various oligarchs, industrial barons, billionaire campaign donors, labor abusers, war mongers, mass polluters, high-tech futurists and other architects of ... well, the mess we’re in.
In our country, only about 10% say democracy is working for most Americans today, with the powers that be not even trying to serve what the majority believes in, wants and needs. Economic fairness, social justice and equal opportunity — our society’s fundamental, unifying values — are being trampled by the greed of moneyed elites and the fear and hatred of small-minded ideological extremists. They squabble over even keeping our government operating and fritter away their time and credibility on crap that undermines public trust.
So, no, Davos crowd, you cannot “rebuild trust,” for no one can trust you. You could gain a real measure of credibility if your elite forum would do something truly significant for democracy, like pushing through a reform to take corporate money out of our politics. That would make Davos historic. Otherwise, you’re just partying ... and stroking your egos.
Jim Hightower is a former Texas Observer editor, former Texas agriculture commissioner, radio commentator and populist sparkplug, a best-selling author and winner of the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Write him at PO Box 40446, Austin, TX 78704, email info@jimhightower.com, or see www.jimhightower.com.
From The Progressive Populist, March 1, 2024
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