Every once in a great while, a major media celebrity comes along who puts his or her talent and — well, celebrity — to work for the common good.
Many generous artistic souls support good causes — and bless them for that! But there are a few who put the public interest at the center of their professional calling, and it’s been my joy to know a couple of them. We just lost a special one: Phil Donahue.
For 30 years, he brought a high-energy mix of unscripted fun, freewheeling grassroots democracy, serious issue exchanges and public purpose to the unlikeliest of venues: daytime TV talk shows. “Donahue” — the person and the show — defied studio bosses and conventional wisdom about what would appeal to “the great unwashed.” His crazy idea was to confront biases directly, with the audience as the stars. He put big issues in front of mainstream audiences before most TV bosses knew they were issues — abortion, medical price gouging, gender identity, atheism, NAFTA, Native Americans, AIDS, nuclear power, prison reform, family farmers, and so much more. And he did it daily, not talking to a pre-selected audience of like-minded people but engaging disparate viewpoints directly in (often fiery) broadcasts.
Moreover, he brought genuine activists (not just sparklies) onto the show as guests. Even I made a couple of appearances. We were not invited to peacock and pontificate but to provide a bit of insight and, most importantly, offer ways for viewers to fight back for fairness, justice and a little more sanity in our world.
Phil Donahue is the model of what democratic media ought to be — an open exchange with regular people to promote the common good. See some “Donahue” for yourself at jimhightower.com/donahue.
Seeing two bloated egos like Elon Musk and Donald Trump hug-up recently in their marriage of political convenience made me think, “Boy, there’s two who really do deserve each other!”
The only question is which one will betray the other first.
My money is on Musk. Yes, Trump has built his entire career on the art of high-profile betrayals, from real estate scams to marriages. But Musk’s crass duplicity is even more naked (please excuse that image). He routinely shifts his core beliefs from one “rock-solid principle” to the opposite, coldly turning on trusting partners and allies, all for personal gain.
Take his 2022 denunciation of President Joe Biden’s climate change proposal, which promised massive support for the electric vehicles sold by Musk. Just two years earlier, the Tesla CEO had proclaimed himself to be “super fired up” about Biden’s plan. But his ego got ruffled by some perceived slight by Biden, so he called for killing the entire climate initiative, smugly declaring Tesla didn’t need public money.
Ha! Far from being some bootstrap, up-from-nothing corporate genius, Musk is the fortunate son of a South African emerald dealer. He didn’t create Tesla, he bought it, then enriched himself by extracting giant subsidies from American taxpayers and ruthlessly cheating workers and suppliers. Tesla’s first factory was built with half a billion federal dollars, he has been milking a public regulatory fund for $9 billion so far, each car he sells gets up to $7,500 in federal subsidies, and he continues to draw about a billion a year in tax breaks from that Biden law he condemned.
Musk says it’s all ethical because the money is there for the taking. Yeah — and so is his integrity.
“I’ve got those
Payday-Friday
Grocery store blues.”
That working-class lament is from an old bluegrass song, but millions of working stiffs are singing it today. While many workers have finally seen an uptick in their paychecks, they’ve been dismayed to see the increase quickly gobbled up by jacked-up grocery prices. What the hell?
Kamala Harris has had the honesty to call it what it is: gouging. And, to put some bite in her bark, she’s proposing a long-overdue national ban on rip-off pricing by food giants. Of course, this produced outraged squeals by corporate functionaries. But some of the most furious squealing is coming from a supposedly unbiased corner of America’s economic structure: economists.
A little-known secret of this occult profession is that most economists are schooled by and working for the corporate order, generally hostile to consumers, workers and other competing interests. One absolute rule they learn is that none of the inequities and iniquities of America’s laissez-fairyland economy are to be blamed on corporate greed.
Thus, a whole pack of mainline economists raced to poo-pooh Harris’ price-gouging charge, asserting that grocery prices have naturally surged due to what they benignly call “price pack architecture.”
Bovine excrement! Price gouging cannot be perfumed by semantics — it is mass swindling, and people can detect it by its stench. So, let’s follow that stench to its anti-free enterprise source: monopoly. For the past half-century, economists in both Republican and Democratic administrations have looked the other way, allowing food giants to consolidate and conglomerate, shut out competitors, monopolize every aspect of the food economy — and steal.
It’s that theft that Harris is daring to challenge, and Americans will cheer her on — no matter how furiously establishment economists squeal.
Right-wing ideologues are mounting a three-pronged fraud trying to delegitimize Social Security, slash its benefits, and then — zzzzzt! — kill it.
First, they tried to demonize our public retirement program as a socialist horror. That hasn’t worked, since this pension literally works, allowing millions of workaday American families to escape old-age poverty.
So, in Lie No. 2, they shriek: “Social Security is bankrupt — you future retirees will be left penniless in old age!” Uh ... no. The bulk of retiree benefits are covered by payroll taxes, which continue to flow in, so the program is in no danger at all of folding.
Well, they exclaim in Lie No. 3, even to keep the program on life support requires gutting it by raising people’s retirement age to 70 or older and slashing monthly payments to retirees.
Uh ... gosh, no again. Such a gut job would be immoral — half of America’s workers get no retirement benefits except Social Security. Plus, such callousness is totally unnecessary, because there’s an obvious, easy and fair fix: Apply the Social Security tax to everyone!
While working stiffs pay this tax on every dollar they earn, millionaires and billionaires are taxed only on the first $170,000 of their astronomical pay. Take Elon Musk, the richest man in America, who claimed a $45 billion paycheck last year. But under current law, he only pays Social Security taxes on $170,000 of that — meaning $44,999,830,000 of his income goes untaxed. Why shouldn’t he pay like everyone else?
Tax everyone equally — the rich as well as the working class — so everyone can have a secure, dignified retirement. That’s what the American concept of the common good means.
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, October 1, 2024
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