“Big Boss Man,” an old song by blues legend Jimmy Reed, still packs a potent political punch for today’s working class:
You got me workin’, boss man, working ‘round the clock
I wanna little drink of water, but you won’t let Jimmy stop
Big boss man, can’t you hear me when I call?
But then, Reed urges workers to see how small the boss man really is:
Well, you ain’t so big, you just tall that’s all.
Well, I’m gonna get me a boss man, one gonna treat me right
Work hard in the day time, rest easy at night.
That could be the anthem of millions of Americans today, who are rebelling against soulless corporate jobs and layers of bosses demanding longer hours doing tedious tasks. These workplace uprisings are not about another dollar a day, rather the idea of work itself is being confronted.
People are realizing that their time, energy and their very lives are being consumed a day at a time to profit faraway Big Boss Men. It’s also dawning on more and more workers that their jobs are pointless — generating paperwork that no one sees, babysitting computer systems, making electronic downloads that are silly, etc.
Thus, large numbers of workers are saying: Who needs it? Is this my “life?”? What’s the point? My “job” could — poof! — disappear tomorrow, and it wouldn’t matter. How am I to take any pride or find a smidgeon of personal fulfillment in surrendering the biggest chunks of my life to that?
This is Jim Hightower saying ... Big Billionaire Bosses like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos bark that it’s time for employees to double down on the “work ethic” — yet there’s no ethical core to the work they demand. Bosses don’t get it, but what’s happening today is not merely a labor rebellion but a revolution for humanity to be valued for itself ... and for workers to become their own bosses.
Here’s a hard-right political twist I wasn’t expecting, and Tim Walz is probably surprised, too.
Within the confines of Trump’s MAGAworld, some are appalled by Walz’s wealth. Wealth? They’re claiming this former high school teacher is rich? No ... and that bothers them.
Walz gets a gubernatorial paycheck and a modest public pension. That’s it. No portfolio of Wall Street stocks, no deferred payouts on corporate bonuses, and he doesn’t even own a house, much less a vacation home. While this pegs him as a regular middle-class American, it seems to put off a covey of moneyed Trumpsters who see his lack of riches as a personal weakness.
The Wall Street Journal recently featured one such partisan, who says he prefers “a high net worth” politician, like J.D. Vance. Being rich, explained the partisan, means a candidate “has financial acumen, business and investment savvy.” Righto! For example, Vance was savvy enough to kiss-up to right-wing Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who has pumped millions into the fictional “hillbilly,” turning Vance into a pretentious “hillwilliam.” And please stop pretending that rich candidates are less corrupt since they aren’t dependent on special-interest funding. Trump himself put the lie to that when he recently begged a Big Oil group to give a billion dollars to his campaign — in exchange for his promise to slash their taxes.
This is Jim Hightower saying ... Most bizarre is the assertion by Walz critics that his failure to be invested in Wall Street stocks means he’s out of touch with the financial concerns of “the average American.” Hello, nearly all stocks are owned by the superrich, like Trump and Vance. In fact, the average American family owns zero stocks — just like Walz.
We’ve recently learned about Project 2025, the GOP’s scheme to let corporate agents take over our government. But what about the less visible effort to make Democrats install corporate-subservient officials who’ll expand their monopoly power?
High-finance finaglers of Wall Street and Silicon Valley are quietly demanding that Kamala Harris commit to appointing their designated toadies to oversee America’s so-called free-enterprise structure. Their primary target is the Federal Trade Commission, a little-known agency meant to protect and extend economic competition.
The FTC is now headed by Lina Khan, a tenacious opponent of anti-consumer, anti-worker mergers and takeovers. She rightly recognizes that the “free” in free enterprise is not an adjective but a verb requiring aggressive public action to free up the enterprise of people who are now routinely shut out of the market by monopolistic giants. So, says Khan, if we really want free markets, let’s free them.
Oh, how the money vultures screeched! “She’s a dope,” raged takeover bully Barry Diller in a dopey fury. And, since many of the monopolistic titans who are offended by Khan’s otherwise very popular progressive populism are from the Democratic Party’s high-dollar donor class, they have undue clout. Thus, they are bluntly demanding her head as their price for financially backing Harris’ presidential run. Commissioner Khan, they exclaim, simply does not understand “the way the Washington game is played.”
Oh, yes, she does — and she’s flat out rejecting it! She’s the first real anti-trust champion America has had in years — but will the party’s higher-ups have the guts and integrity to defend her? Or will the business-as-usual powers be ushered back in? The answer to that will be an early measure of Harris’ commitment to economic democracy.
Challenging conventional wisdom can advance society’s understanding of truth. Good. Arrogantly challenging the complex balance of nature, however, can go kablooie! Very bad.
In recent times, there’s been an unfortunate tendency for some scientific hotshots to send society off on techno-tangents to “remake” nature, promising miracles. About 70 years ago, for example, a so-called agricultural science genius promised that dumping synthetic pesticides on monoculture crops across the globe would end hunger. Chemical giants and governments rushed to do the dump, but the “fix” ultimately resulted in the ongoing poisoning of Earth’s land, water, food and people — while enriching agricultural monopolists and allowing hunger to rage.
Unfortunately, insistence by technologists and profiteers that they can outsmart and overwhelm nature is now being pushed with cosmic vengeance. A covey of arrogant academics and billionaire backers are saying: “Trust us, we can handle that little global warming issue.”
One is named David Keith, running a $100 million “stratospheric solar geoengineering” scheme named SCoPEx. Keith proposes to solve global warming by — get this — dispensing volumes of sulfur dioxide into the Earth’s stratosphere to “regulate” the amount and location of sunlight around the globe.
Gosh, what could go wrong with that? Never mind the unknown consequences of tampering with basic nature, argues Keith, for his bold techno-fix to global warming bypasses the political difficulty of ending our fossil fuel addiction — so we should just do it.
Keith does admit he can be “inappropriately forceful ... I’m intense,” he says. Well, then, let’s all chip in a for some therapy sessions to help him overcome his megalomania before he makes an irreversible mess of the only planet we have that sustains life.
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 info@jimhightower.com or see www.jimhightower.com.
From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2024
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